Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
stone breaker

stone breaker

6.7
A person who smashes large hard rocks by hand for building or road work
  • noun
translation icon : rompedor de piedras
  • The town hired a stone breaker to remove the large boulders blocking the pathway.

Examples

  • At dawn they took him from his cell and walked him down to the stone breaker's yard and stood him before a wall.

  • Stones are not broken, except by an earnest use of the hammer; and the stone-breaker must go down on his knees.

    Blog text (23)

  • The stone breaker worked tirelessly to prepare the road for the new highway.

  • Every day, the stone breaker arrives at the construction site with his tools to start the job.

Synonyms

breaker
vsstone breaker
  • Archaic
35 9.3

A person who splits large rocks to make blocks of stone

is focused on splitting rock for construction and road projects
ledgeman
vsstone breaker
  • Archaic
9.9

A man who splits stone blocks from a ledge in a quarry

is a construction or road laborer who splits rock regardless of gender or ledge

Surface Forms

stone breaker singular
stone breakers plural

Morphology

stone + breaker

The meaning 'a person whose job is to break stones' is directly and compositionally derived from 'stone' (rock material) + 'breaker' (an agent who breaks). This object+agent compound follows a regular English word-formation pattern that is cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the meaning.

Etymology

The noun stone breaker comes from a simple picture: a worker using a hammer to smash large stones into smaller pieces for roads or buildings. So, it means 'a person whose job is to break stones'.