1. One who cuts or carves stone; a workman engaged in shaping stone for building, ornamental, or other purposes; one who carves figures or inscriptions on stone.
Stone-cutter’s disease or phthisis, an affection of the lungs, incident to stone-cutters, caused by inhaling the fine dust of the stones.
1540. in Lett. & Papers Hen. VIII. (1898), XVI. 195. Dirrike Johnson, stone cutter.
1585. Higins, Junius’ Nomencl., 505/1. Lapicida,… a quarrier: a hewer of stone: a stone cutter.
1605. Shaks., Lear, II. ii. 63. A Taylor Sir, a Stone-cutter, or a Painter, could not haue made him so ill, though they had bin but two yeares oth’trade.
1684. Boyle, Porousn. Anim. & Solid Bodies, vi. 101. The invention of staining or colouring white Marble,… casually lighted upon by an ingenious Stone-cutter in Oxford.
1724. De Foe, Tour Gt. Brit., I. III. 69. This Island [Portland] … the Inhabitants being almost all Stone-Cutters, we found there was no very poor People among them.
1829. S. Shaw, Staffordsh. Porteries, 131. The old Inscription was almost effaced, when two of the parish servants … paid a stone-cutter to sink the letters.
1866. A. Flint, Princ. Med. (1880), 186. Chalicosis pulmonum is the name given to the pulmonary changes induced by the inhalation of stone-dust. It is also called stone-cutter’s phthisis.
1877. Ruskin, St. Mark’s Rest, iv. (1894), 47. Desiring to show, not a mere symbol of a living man, but the man himself, as truly as the poor stone-cutter can carve him.
1896. Leask, Hugh Miller, ii. 44. He was feeling the first effects of the stone-cutters’ disease, and his lungs, affected by the stone dust, threatened consumption.
1908. W. M. Ramsay, Luke the Physician, xii. 362. Then I conjecture that … the stone-cutter accidentally omitted the fourth hexameter.
b. A machine for cutting or shaping stone.
1875. Knight, Dict. Mech., Stone-cutter, a machine for working a face on a stone or ashlar…. It differs from the stone-dresser, which may be said to begin its duty after the surface is fairly flattened. Ibid. (1884), Suppl. s.v. Stone Cutting Machine, Atchison’s stone cutter.
† 2. A surgeon who ‘cuts for the stone’ (CUT v. 26 b); a lithotomist. Obs.
1655. Moufet & Bennet, Health’s Improv. (1746), 218. No People in the World are more subject [than the Netherlanders] to that Disease [sc. stone], as the Number and Excellency of Stone-cutters in that Country may plainly prove.
1787. Phil. Trans., LXXVIII. 32. The Egyptians … had … not only regular physicians … but likewise stone-cutters, oculists, aurists, &c.
So Stone-cutting, the process or art of cutting or shaping stone; also attrib.
1611. Cotgr., Statuaire, (the art of) Stone-cutting, or Statue-making.
1828. P. Nicholson (title), A popular … treatise on Masonry and Stone-cutting.
1838. Ht. Martineau, Western Trav., I. 225. The stone-cutting department.
