gôn

noun. stone (a stone or a single thing made of stone)

A word mentioned in notes from the late 1950s, as contrasted with S. gond “stone”:

> Sindarin had a short form gŏn- < ✶PQ gōn, gon-, stone, a stone, or a single thing made of stone, as dist[inct] from gondō, stone — general as a substance or material (PE17/28).

Tolkien also mentioned it in his Nomenclature of the Lord of the Rings, saying “in Sindarin the shorter gon- was used for smaller objects made of stone, especially carved figures” (RC/347). In notes on the Common Eldarin Article (CEA) from 1969, Tolkien had gôn with plural form i·ñ(g)uin “stones” (PE23/139). In that document Tolkien revised {gond >>} gôn, but I believe this was because he realized gond was a mass noun that would not have a proper plural, and changed to the “short form” gôn to illustrate plural mutations.

As such, I think Tolkien intended gôn and gond to co-exist, with gôn being an individual stone or a (small) single thing made of stone, while gond was “stone” as a mass noun, for stone as a material, a body of rock, or stone as an abstraction.

gôn

stone

(i ’ôn, construct gon); pl. gŷn, coll. pl. #gonath as in Argonath.