stack

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”), which per Kroonen (arguing for the controversial Kluge's law) is from *stogʰ-nós, cognate with Ancient Greek στόχος (stokhos), but unclear whether he derives *stogʰ-nós from a Proto-Indo-European *stegʰ- (“pole; rod; stick; stake”). Per Pokorny et al., from PIE *(s)teg- (“stake, pole, rod, stick, beam”) and cognate with Latin tignum ("tree trunk, beam, log"), but not cognate with Ancient Greek στόχος. Cognate with Icelandic stakkur (“stack”), Swedish stack (“stack”), Danish stak (“stack”), Norwegian stakk (“stack”). Related to stake and sauna.

noun

1. (heading) A pile.
   1. A large pile of hay, grain, straw, or the like, larger at the bottom than the top, sometimes covered with thatch.
      But corn was housed, and beans were in the stack. c. 1790, William Cowper, The Needless Alarm
   2. A pile of similar objects, each directly on top of the last.
      Please bring me a chair from that stack in the corner.
   3. (UK) A pile of poles or wood, indefinite in quantity.
   4. A pile of wood containing 108 cubic feet. (~3 m³)
   5. An extensive collection
      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'. 1997, Guy Claxton, Hare brain, tortoise mind: why intelligence increases when you think less
      “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 2005, Elizabeth McLeod, The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928-1943 Radio Serial, McFarland, page 26
      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 2007, Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Education and Skills Committee, Post-16 skills: ninth report of session 2006-07, Vol. 2: Oral and written evidence, The Stationery Office →ISBN, page 42
2. A smokestack.
   Long before Shap platform showed up around a corner and the two arms on the gradient post drooped in both directions at once, Duchess of Buccleuch's amiable throbbing purr at the stack had become a fierce freight-engine bark, as she resolutely dragged at her enormous load. 1949 January and February, F. G. Roe, “I Saw Three Englands–1”, in Railway Magazine, page 12
   The leading engine was one of the Class Y6 2-8-8-2 compound articulateds, … The stack noise of one of these great brutes slogging up a grade was quite unforgettable. 1961 July, J. Geoffrey Todd, “Impressions of railroading in the United States: Part Two”, in Trains Illustrated, page 419
3. (heading) In computing.
   1. (programming) A linear data structure in which items inserted are removed in reverse order (the last item inserted is the first one to be removed).
   2. (computing, often with "the") A stack data structure stored in main memory that is manipulated during machine language procedure call related instructions.
      When the microprocessor decodes the JSR opcode, it stores the operand into the TEMP register and pushes the current contents of the PC ($00 0128) onto the stack. 1992, Michael A. Miller, The 68000 Microprocessor Family: Architecture, Programming, and Applications, page 47
   3. An implementation of a protocol suite (set of protocols forming a layered architecture).
      A TCP/IP stack is a library or set of libraries or of OS drivers that take care of networking.
   4. A combination of interdependent, yet individually replaceable, software components or technologies used together on a system.
      A Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) stack is a configuration of four popular products for hosting websites. 2016, John Paul Mueller, AWS For Admins For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, page 323
4. (mathematics) A generalization of schemes in algebraic geometry and of sheaves.
5. (geology) A coastal landform, consisting of a large vertical column of rock in the sea.
6. (library) Compactly spaced bookshelves used to house large collections of books.
   You took me to your library and kissed me in the stacks. 1994, The Magnetic Fields, “Swinging London”, in Holiday
7. (figurative) A large amount of an object.
   They paid him a stack of money to keep quiet.
8. (military) A pile of rifles or muskets in a cone shape.
9. (poker) The amount of money a player has on the table.
10. (heading) In architecture.
    1. A number of flues embodied in one structure, rising above the roof.
    2. A vertical drainpipe.
11. (Australia, slang) A fall or crash, a prang.
    "You've got to go all out in a race or you don't get a good time," he said. "But going all out means that you have a few stacks." 1989-04-09, Ian Watt, “Canberra skier wins medals”, in The Canberra Times, retrieved 2022-08-07
    Fan-shot footage of Bieber’s big stack (not a euphemism) sees the pop singer trying to adjust his pants during a concert in the Canadian city of Saskatoon on Thursday night, 16th June, before an audible “THWACK” can be heard as he falls off the stage. 2016-06-19, Tom Williams, “Watch Justin Bieber Stack It, Fall Off Stage While Fixing His Pants”, in Music Feeds, Evolve Media, retrieved 2020-11-17
12. (bodybuilding) A blend of various dietary supplements or anabolic steroids with supposed synergistic benefits.
13. (aviation) A holding pattern, with aircraft circling one above the other as they wait to land.
14. (video games) The quantity of a given item which fills up an inventory slot or bag.
    I've got 107 Golden Branches, but the stack size is 20 so they're taking up 6 spaces in my inventory.

verb

1. (transitive) To arrange in a stack, or to add to an existing stack.
   Please stack those chairs in the corner.
   James Hanson, the striker who used to stack shelves in a supermarket, flashed a superb header past Shay Given from Gary Jones's corner 10 minutes after the break. January 22, 2013, Phil McNulty, “Aston Villa 2-1 Bradford (3-4)”, in BBC
   Not long ago, it was difficult to produce photographs of tiny creatures with every part in focus.[…]A photo processing technique called focus stacking has changed that. Developed as a tool to electronically combine the sharpest bits of multiple digital images, focus stacking is a boon to biologists seeking full focus on a micron scale. 2013 July-August, Catherine Clabby, “Focus on Everything”, in American Scientist
2. (transitive, card games) To arrange the cards in a deck in a particular manner.
   This is the third hand in a row where you've drawn four of a kind. Someone is stacking the deck!
3. (transitive, poker) To take all the money another player currently has on the table.
   I won Jill's last $100 this hand; I stacked her!
4. (transitive) To deliberately distort the composition of (an assembly, committee, etc.).
   The Government was accused of stacking the parliamentary committee.
   2017 July 26, Lindsay Murdoch, "Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand's first female PM, faces financial ruin and jail", in smh.com.au, The Sydney Morning Herald; In 2015 the country's military-stacked national assembly impeached her and banned her from political office over the scheme, which her government introduced after she had campaigned in 2011 promising to support the rural poor.
5. (transitive, US, Australia, slang) To crash; to fall.
   Jim couldn′t make it today as he stacked his car on the weekend.
   1975, Laurie Clancy, A Collapsible Man, Outback Press, page 43, Miserable phone calls from Windsor police station or from Russell Street. ‘Mum, I′ve stacked the car; could you get me a lawyer?’, the middle-class panacea for all diseases.
   Marmalade: Who stacked the car? (pointing to Saloon) Fangio here. Jock: (standing) I claim full responsibility for the second bingle. 1984, Jack Hibberd, A Country Quinella: Two Celebration Plays, page 80
   Eventually he sideswiped a bus and forced other cars to collide, and as he finally stacked the car up on a bridge abutment, he passed out, perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps from his head hitting the windshield. 2002, Ernest Keen, Depression: Self-Consciousness, Pretending, and Guilt, page 19
   2007, Martin Chipperfield, slut talk, Night Falling, 34th Parallel Publishing, US, Trade Paperback, page 100, oh shit danny, i stacked the car ran into sally, an old school friend you stacked the car? so now i need this sally′s address for the insurance, danny says
6. (gaming) To operate cumulatively.
   A magical widget will double your mojo. And yes, they do stack: if you manage to get two magical widgets, your mojo will be quadrupled. With three, it will be octupled, and so forth.
7. (aviation, transitive) To place (aircraft) into a holding pattern.
8. (informal, intransitive) To collect precious metal in the form of various small objects such as coins and bars.
9. (printing) To have excessive ink transfer.