When autumn begins in the northern hemisphere, people often decorate their businesses and homes to get ready for Halloween. The National Retail Federation says Americans will spend a whopping $3.2 billion on Halloween decorations this year, so as you can imagine (or as you may have seen in your own neighborhood) these decorations can be quite elaborate. You often see mummies, witches, skeletons, spiders, jack-o-lanterns, black cats, cobwebs, ghosts, and tombstones. Or are they headstones? Or gravestones? Is there a difference? Does it even matter?
The words tombstone and gravestone used to refer to large stone slabs that served as a lid for a tomb or covering for a grave. They might have had engravings on them, but their purpose was to secure a deceased body in a tomb or in the ground. "Gravestone" is the older word, being used from the late 1300s, and "tombstone" is from the mid-1500s. A headstone, as the word implies, referred to a grave marker placed at the head of a grave. It's the newest of the three words, arising in 1676, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Today, the words tombstone, gravestone, and headstone are often used interchangeably to refer to stone grave markers of any size or style. Regardless of which term you use, all three words refer to something made of stone that marks where someone is or will be buried. Sometimes cemeteries have grave markers showing where people who are still alive will be buried someday, but most grave markers indicate where someone has already been buried. So, whether they are being used to designate the location of a present grave or future grave, all three words—"tombstone," "headstone," and "gravestone"—refer to the same thing: a burial site with a marker made of stone.
Other words are also used to refer to grave markers. For example, the...
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