A Stonemason's Dictionary
A pocket dictionary of masonry terms, names and expressions

Welcome to our toolbox dictionary of stonemasonry terms and related words - hope you find it interesting.

Click on the letters below to visit the appropriate pages.
 

Stonemasonry is one of the oldest of the building trades, indeed, it is one of the oldest trades of any description! Its roots go back to the dawning days of the human race when the first caveman decided his troglodyte home would benefit from a pile of stones heaped up in its entrance to keep out some of the weather. Probably only the hunting and gathering of food  predate mans utilisation of lumps of stone.

I am, of course, making a rather sweeping and flippant generalisation here, stonemasonry as practised today isn’t to be readily compared to the piling up of a few dozen boulders. But some aspects have changed remarkably little, for example tools found in Egypt dating back to the time of the great pyramids would easily go unnoticed in a modern stonemason’s toolbox; the materials might be different (bronze chisels) but their basic design bears a striking similarity to the tools in use today. Also, let's not forget that stone itself one of the oldest materials on earth is exactly the same as it was then. So it is, I suppose, inevitable that stonemasonry has quite an extensive lexicon of words and terms - I’ve included a good few here for you to browse (some of them I am sure are probably regional). This isn’t a comprehensive list of all building related terms, that would be a truly enormous undertaking for which I am not qualified, but a pocket guide to the stonemasons’ vocabulary!