stool

Etymology 1

From Middle English stool, stole, stol, from Old English stōl (“chair, seat, throne”), from Proto-West Germanic *stōl, from Proto-Germanic *stōlaz (“chair”) (compare West Frisian stoel, Dutch stoel, German Stuhl, Swedish/Norwegian/Danish stol, Finnish tuoli, Estonian tool), from Proto-Indo-European *stoh₂los (compare Lithuanian stálas, Russian стол (stol, “table”), Russian стул (stul, “chair”), Serbo-Croatian stol (“table”), Slovene stol (“chair”), Albanian kështallë (“crutch”), Ancient Greek στήλη (stḗlē, “block of stone used as a prop or buttress to a wall”)), from *steh₂- (“to stand”). More at stand. The medical use derives from sense 2 (seat used for defecation).

noun

1. A seat, especially for one person and without armrests.
   1. A seat for one person without a back or armrests.
   2. A footstool.
   3. (now chiefly dialectal, Scotland) A seat with a back; a chair.
   4. (now chiefly dialectal, Scotland, literally and figurative) A throne.
2. (obsolete) A close-stool; a seat used for urination and defecation: a chamber pot, commode, outhouse seat, or toilet.
3. (horticulture) A plant that has been cut down until its main stem is close to the ground, resembling a stool, to promote new growth.
   The ground in almost every part of it is covered with stools or stems of Oak, at not more than three feet stool from stool, and these not having been thinned since last cutting, are completely overburdened, and are evidently killing each other and dying for want of nourishment […] 1827, Robert Monteath, Miscellaneous Reports on Woods and Plantations, Shewing a Method to Plant, Rear, and Recover all Woods, Plantations and Timber Trees on every Soil and Situation in Britain and Ireland …, Dundee: Printed and sold by James Chalmers [et al.], →OCLC, page 51
   With stool bedding, the plants are pruned back to the ground in the dormant season, and the shoots that form in the spring have juvenile characteristics and are called "juvenile reversion shoots." Stool bedding or stool bed layering is a common practice for the production of rootstocks of apple. […] The closer the apical meristem is to the roots of the plant, the more juvenile it is likely to be. This feature is exploited by techniques such as hedging or stool bedding that employ severe pruning to decrease the distance between the new growth and the root system, thus acting to rejuvenate the plant and benefit from the ease of rooting that is characteristic of the juvenile phase. 2011, Caula A. Beyl, Robert N. Trigiano, editors, Plant Propagation Concepts and Laboratory Exercises, 2nd edition, Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, pages 88 and 154
   A coppice may be large, in which case trees, usually ash (Fraxinus) or maple (Acer) are cut, leaving a massive stool from which up to 10 trunks arise; or small, in which case trees, usually hazel (Corylus), hawthorn (Crataegus), or willow (Salix), are cut to leave small, underground stools producing many short stems. […] One consequence of coppicing is that the stool enlarges because each subsequent growth of shoots occurs on its outside. The diameter of a stool is thus directly related to its age. […] stool 1. A tree stump that is capable of producing new shoots. 2. The permanent base of a *coppiced tree. 2012, Michael Allaby, editor, A Dictionary of Plant Sciences, 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 125 and 486
4. (chiefly medicine) Feces, excrement.
   I provided the doctor with stool samples.
   Two days prior to the consultation, an abdominal radiograph was done because the patient hadn't stooled in a week. No signs of obstruction and no abnormal accumulations of stool were found. 2014, David R. Fleisher, Management of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders in Children: Biopsychosocial Concepts for Clinical Practice, New York, N.Y.: Springer, page 79
5. (chiefly medicine) A production of feces or excrement, an act of defecation, stooling.
   Normal stooling is widely variant. Some infants only have one stool per day, especially those on formula feeding. Others may stool with each feeding. Such frequent stooling is common in breast-fed infants during the first month of life. 2004, Gary A. Emmett, Field Guide to the Normal Newborn, Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, page 132
6. (archaic) A decoy; a portable piece of wood to which a pigeon is fastened to lure wild birds.
7. (nautical) A small channel on the side of a vessel, for the deadeyes of the backstays.
   the fore backstay deadeyes and stool had to be lowered 2 feet 1972, The Mariner's Mirror
8. (US, dialect) Material, such as oyster shells, spread on the sea bottom for oyster spat to adhere to.

verb

1. (chiefly medicine) To produce stool: to defecate.
   Infrequent stooling in the first month of life is almost always due to insufficient intake of milk. A baby who is voiding but not stooling or gaining weight may not be receiving enough high fat hindmilk. Stooling frequency will correct itself with additional feeds or making sure the infant receives more hind milk at a feed. 1999, Judith Lauwers, Debbie Shinskie, Counseling the Nursing Mother: A Lactation Consultant's Guide, 3rd edition, Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, page 204
   Normal stooling is widely variant. Some infants only have one stool per day, especially those on formula feeding. Others may stool with each feeding. Such frequent stooling is common in breast-fed infants during the first month of life. 2004, Gary A. Emmett, Field Guide to the Normal Newborn, Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, page 132
   Two days prior to the consultation, an abdominal radiograph was done because the patient hadn't stooled in a week. No signs of obstruction and no abnormal accumulations of stool were found. 2014, David R. Fleisher, Management of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders in Children: Biopsychosocial Concepts for Clinical Practice, New York, N.Y.: Springer, page 79
2. (horticulture) To cut down (a plant) until its main stem is close to the ground, resembling a stool, to promote new growth.
   Cutting back to the same position annually is usually referred to as pollarding; cutting nearly to the ground is usually called stooling. Both are good methods of controlling height and maintaining vigor on plants that would normally grow to a large size. […] Those [plants] that generate many small stems crowded together are difficult to pollard so they are normally stooled. Some people refer to stooling as coppice. 2011, Edward F. Gilman, An Illustrated Guide to Pruning, 3rd edition, Clifton Park, N.Y.: Delmar, Cengage Learning, page 411
   The healthier of your two hollies is multi-stemmed, indicating that it was once stooled (cut down to a point just above the ground). It has since grown back vigorously to become a thick, wide tree which enabled it even more to overshadow the one that you say was quite severely pruned last year. 23 October 2015, Helen Yemm, “How to rescue a dying holly tree [print version: Halt weed invasion, a holly tree's last stand, 24 October 2015, page 7]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review), London, archived from the original on 2015-10-29

Etymology 2

Latin stolo. See stolon.

noun

1. A plant from which layers are propagated by bending its branches into the soil.
   The process of layering is well known: it consists in bending a young branch […] into the soil to a certain depth, and elevating the top part of it out of the soil in an upright direction; in time the buried part takes root, and the shoot becomes a perfect plant. The root which produces the young shoots for layering is called the stool. Stools are planted about six feet apart every way in a deep fresh soil. […] Stool. – The root of a tree which has been left in the ground, the produce of another tree, or shoot for saplings, underwood, &c. 1832, George Sinclair, Useful and Ornamental Planting: With an Index, London: Baldwin and Cradock, Paternoster-Row, →OCLC, pages 27 and 91
   Soon after harvest, new shoots emerge from axillary buds on the stubble and give rise to the ratoon crop. Initially the young shoots are dependent upon the roots of the previous crop (stool roots) but these are replaced by new shoot roots […]. 2005, Patrice Cadet, Vaughan W. Spaull, “Nematode Parasites of Sugarcane”, in Michel Luc, Richard A. Sikora, John Bridge, editors, Plant Parasitic Nematodes in Subtropical and Tropical Agriculture, 2nd edition, Wallingford, Oxon., Cambridge, Mass.: CABI Publishing, page 646

verb

1. (agriculture) To ramify; to tiller, as grain; to shoot out suckers.
   I worked very hard in the copse of young ash, with my billhook and a shearing-knife; cutting out the saplings where they stooled too close together, making spars to keep for thatching, wall-crooks to drive into the cob, stiles for close sheep hurdles, and handles for rakes, and hoes, and two-bills, of the larger and straighter stuff. 1869, Richard D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone, chapter 38
   The plants stooled out well, and yielded a heavy cutting of rather tough cane. In its young state it should make good silage. 1904, Queensland Department of Agriculture and Stock, Annual Report, →OCLC, page 80
   In a field experiment planted in spring 1969, the red raspberry 'Glen Clova' was grown both in hedgerows and in stooled rows. Although spur blight (Didymella applanata) and cane botrytis (Botrytis cinerea) were more frequent on canes removed as thinnings from the hedgerows than on those removed from stooled plots, the differences were trivial. 1981, Horticultural Research, volume 21, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, →OCLC, page 149