to stone: to kill a person by pelting them with stones
This verb has one settled meaning: to put someone to death by throwing stones at them. It appears only sixteen times, and every use is about a literal killing except for two prophetic pictures in Ezekiel. Wherever it appears, the striking feature is that the killing is done by a group, not by a single executioner.
It belongs above all to the laws of Leviticus and Numbers, where the condemned person is stoned by "all the congregation." The whole community carries out the sentence, and in doing so removes both the offender and the guilt from among themselves. This shared, communal act is the word's signature, and it is why the same verb turns up in the stories of crowds killing on the spot, such as the officer Adoram and the priest Zechariah.
Hebrew has a second verb for the very same act, סָקַל, which the book of Deuteronomy and the older laws prefer instead. The two overlap almost entirely, and scholars disagree about whether this word adds any real shade of its own, such as a sense of hurling or pelting, or is simply an interchangeable alternative.
Ezekiel then turns the word around. He takes the community's own execution word and uses it for foreign armies stoning Jerusalem, pictured as a condemned woman. The choice of word is itself the message: the act Israel was told to use for purging evil from within becomes the way Israel herself is judged.