stack
/stæk/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.05 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A pile.
noun
A pile.
noun
A pile.
noun
A pile.
noun
A smokestack.
noun
In computing.
noun
In computing.
Example Sentences
- "But corn was housed, and beans were in the stack."
- "Please bring me a chair from that stack in the corner."
- "There was againſt euery Pillar, a Stacke of Billets, aboue a Mans Height;"
- "She performed appallingly on standard neurological tests, which are, as Sacks perceptively notes, specifically designed to deconstruct the whole person into a stack of 'abilities'."
- "“We said, 'Maybe we could come up with a couple of characters doing jokes,'” Correll recalled in 1972. “We had a whole stack of jokes we used to do in these home talent shows"
- "Going back to an earlier question, which I think is very important, this question of how you use skills. It is no good having a great stack of skills in a workplace if the employer does not utilise them properly"
Etymology
From Middle English stack, stacke, stakke, stak, from Old Norse stakkr (“a barn; haystack; heap; pile”), from Proto-Germanic *stakkaz (“a barn; rick; haystack”). The data structure sense is a calque of Dutch stapel, introduced by Edsger W. Dijkstra. Cognate with Icelandic stakkur (“stack”), Swedish stack (“stack”), Danish stak (“stack”), Norwegian stakk (“stack”). Related to stake and sauna.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /stæk/
- British English: /stæk/
Usage
- British usage
- Australian usage
- Slang
- Transitive verb
- American usage
- Informal
- Intransitive verb