lithograph

\ \ [19] Greek líthos meant ‘stone’. It has contributed a small cluster of words to English, including lithium [19] (a metal so named from its mineral origin), lithops [20] (the name of a small pebble-like plant, coined in the 1920s, which means literally ‘stoneface’ in Greek), lithosphere [19] (the solid outer layer of the Earth), lithotomy [18] (the surgical removal of stones from the bladder), megalith [19], monolith [19], and the various terms for subdivisions of the Stone Age, such as Neolithic [19] and Paleolithic [19]. Lithography itself, which denotes a method of printing from a flat surface, means etymologically ‘stone-writing’, reflecting the fact that the original printing surfaces in this process were of stone (they are now usually metal).