The verb hone means to sharpen skills. When you practice shooting baskets every day after school, you are honing your skills as a basketball player.
To hone is to sharpen a knife or perfect a skill. Home is where you live, where your stuff is, is where the heart is, and all that.
Hone, the verb, literally means to sharpen with a hone, a whetstone used to sharpen cutting tools. Use hone to describe someone working hard, perfecting or sharpening skills, as in "She is honing her skills as an actress by working in community theater." Hone, which rhymes with phone, is from the Old English word, han, meaning "stone, rock."
If you feel that something isn't worthy of your consideration, you may disdain it (or treat it with disdain).
In Old French, deignier meant "to treat something as worthy." To disdain something, then, is to treat it with contempt: "Management at [the company] displayed a certain disdain for safety and appeared to regard safety-conscious workers as wimps in the organization." As a verb, disdain carries an air of self-righteousness not associated with similar words like despise, abhor, detest, loathe and scorn. So if you disdain something, you might reject it with a haughty scoff, "Ha!"
A mill is a factory or plant, especially one that's equipped for grinding grain into flour. The facility is a mill, and the machine that does the actual grinding is also called a mill.
When a mill crushes and grinds grain like wheat or corn, you can say it mills flour. Other kinds of mills might mill powder or coffee — and still other mills don't actually grind anything; instead, they manufacture things like steel or paper. If someone "mills around," they wander or move about in a confused way: "The crowd mills around during the concert's intermission." This sense of mill was originally used to describe cattle.
1.nv a plant consisting of one or more buildings with facilities fo…
To banish is to get rid of. Think very carefully before you banish someone from your group. Someday, you may want that person around again.
Banish rhymes with vanish, which is exactly what happens when you banish someone. Suppose a king, angry with some of his subjects, banishes them. They have to leave the kingdom and vanish — not just go home and wait for the king to change his mind. Banish comes from the Old French word banir, which means “proclaim as an outlaw.” It is serious and absolute. You can see the word ban in banish, but to ban something is not as harsh as banishing it.
When you ridicule someone, you mock or make fun of them. They become the object of your ridicule or mockery. Your bad behavior might bring ridicule on your parents, who raised you to know better.
The word ridicule is related to ridiculous. If you ridicule a friend, you try to make them look ridiculous. But now that isn't very friendly! Both words come from the Latin redire which means to laugh. When you are ridiculed, you are made a laughing stock, but being the object of ridicule is never funny.
Watch out when a situation becomes volatile — it is likely to change for the worse suddenly. If you and your best friend have a volatile relationship, you frequently fight and make up.
Volatile from Latin volatilis "fleeting, transitory" always gives the sense of sudden, radical change. Think of it as the opposite of stable. A person who is volatile loses his or her temper suddenly and violently. A volatile political situation could erupt into civil war. When the stock market is volatile, it fluctuates greatly. And in scientific language, a volatile oil evaporates quickly.