stack definition | Dictionary.com

stack

[stak]

–noun

1.	a more or less orderly pile or heap: a precariously balanced stack of books; a neat stack of papers.

2.	a large, usually conical, circular, or rectangular pile of hay, straw, or the like.

3.	Often, stacks. a set of shelves for books or other materials ranged compactly one above the other, as in a library.

4.	stacks, the area or part of a library in which the books and other holdings are stored or kept.

5.	a number of chimneys or flues grouped together.

6.	smokestack.

7.	a vertical duct for conveying warm air from a leader to a register on an upper story of a building.

8.	a vertical waste pipe or vent pipe serving a number of floors.

9.	Informal. a great quantity or number.

10.	Radio. an antenna consisting of a number of components connected in a substantially vertical series.

11.	Computers. a linear list arranged so that the last item stored is the first item retrieved.

12.	Military. a conical, free-standing group of three rifles placed on their butts and hooked together with stacking swivels.

13.	Also called air stack, stackup. Aviation. a group of airplanes circling over an airport awaiting their turns to land.

14.	an English measure for coal and wood, equal to 108 cubic feet (3 cu. m).

15.	Geology. a column of rock isolated from a shore by the action of waves.

16.

Games.

a.	a given quantity of chips that can be bought at one time, as in poker or other gambling games.

b.	the quantity of chips held by a player at a given point in a gambling game.

–verb (used with object)

17.	to pile, arrange, or place in a stack: to stack hay; to stack rifles.

18.	to cover or load with something in stacks or piles.

19.	to arrange or select unfairly in order to force a desired result, esp. to load (a jury, committee, etc.) with members having a biased viewpoint: The lawyer charged that the jury had been stacked against his client.

20.	to keep (a number of incoming airplanes) flying nearly circular patterns at various altitudes over an airport where crowded runways, a low ceiling, or other temporary conditions prevent immediate landings.

–verb (used without object)

21.	to be arranged in or form a stack: These chairs stack easily.

—Verb phrase

22.

stack up,

a.	Aviation. to control the flight patterns of airplanes waiting to land at an airport so that each circles at a designated altitude.

b.	Informal. to compare; measure up (often fol. by against): How does the movie stack up against the novel?

c.	Informal. to appear plausible or in keeping with the known facts: Your story just doesn't stack up.

—Idioms

23.	blow one's stack, Slang. to lose one's temper or become uncontrollably angry, esp. to display one's fury, as by shouting: When he came in and saw the mess he blew his stack.

24.

stack the deck,

a.	to arrange cards or a pack of cards so as to cheat: He stacked the deck and won every hand.

b.	to manipulate events, information, etc., esp. unethically, in order to achieve an advantage or desired result.

Origin:
1250–1300; (n.) ME stak < ON stakkr haystack; (v.) ME stakken, deriv. of the v.

Related forms:

stacker, noun

stackless, adjective

smoke⋅stack

[smohk-stak]

–noun

1.	Also called stack. a pipe for the escape of the smoke or gases of combustion, as on a steamboat, locomotive, or building.

–adjective

2.	pertaining to, engaged in, or dependent on a basic heavy industry, as steel or automaking: smokestack companies.

Origin:
1855–60; smoke + stack

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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Link To stack

stack (stāk)

A large, usually conical pile of straw or fodder arranged for outdoor storage.
An orderly pile, especially one arranged in layers. See Synonyms at heap.
Computer Science A section of memory and its associated registers used for temporary storage of information in which the item most recently stored is the first to be retrieved.
A group of three rifles supporting each other, butt downward and forming a cone.
1. A chimney or flue.
2. A group of chimneys arranged together.
A vertical exhaust pipe, as on a ship or locomotive.
An extensive arrangement of bookshelves. Often used in the plural.
stacks The area of a library in which most of the books are shelved.
A stackup.
An English measure of coal or cut wood, equal to 108 cubic feet (3.06 cubic meters).
Informal A large quantity: a stack of work to do.

v. stacked, stack·ing, stacks

v. tr.

To arrange in a stack; pile.
To load or cover with stacks or piles: stacked the dishwasher.
1. Games To prearrange the order of (a deck of cards) so as to increase the chance of winning.
2. To prearrange or fix unfairly so as to favor a particular outcome: tried to stack the jury.
To direct (aircraft) to circle at different altitudes while waiting to land.

v. intr.
To form a stack.
Phrasal Verb(s):
stack up Informal

To measure up or equal: Their gift doesn't stack up against his.
To make sense; add up: Her report just doesn't stack up.

[Middle English stac, from Old Norse stakkr.]
stack'a·ble adj., stack'er n.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Stack

Stack\, a. [Icel. stakkr; akin to Sw. stack, Dan. stak. Sf. Stake.]

1. A large pile of hay, grain, straw, or the like, usually of a nearly conical form, but sometimes rectangular or oblong, contracted at the top to a point or ridge, and sometimes covered with thatch.

But corn was housed, and beans were in the stack. --Cowper.

2. A pile of poles or wood, indefinite in quantity.

Against every pillar was a stack of billets above a man's height. --Bacon.

3. A pile of wood containing 108 cubic feet. [Eng.]

4. (Arch.) (a) A number of flues embodied in one structure, rising above the roof. Hence: (b) Any single insulated and prominent structure, or upright pipe, which affords a conduit for smoke; as, the brick smokestack of a factory; the smokestack of a steam vessel.

Stack of arms (Mil.), a number of muskets or rifles set up together, with the bayonets crossing one another, forming a sort of conical self-supporting pile.

Stack

Stack\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Stacked; p. pr. & vb. n. Stacking.] [Cf. Sw. stacka, Dan. stakke. See Stack, n.] To lay in a conical or other pile; to make into a large pile; as, to stack hay, cornstalks, or grain; to stack or place wood.

To stack arms (Mil.), to set up a number of muskets or rifles together, with the bayonets crossing one another, and forming a sort of conical pile.

Language Translation for : stack

Italian: pila, catasta,

German: der Stapel,

Japanese: 積重ね

More Translations »

stack

n. The set of things a person has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack. "I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my stack." "I haven't done it yet because every time I pop my stack something new gets pushed." If you are interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, "My stack overflowed" means "I forget what we were talking about." The implication is that more items were pushed onto the stack than could be remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The usual physical example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates or trays sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest spring up a bit. See also push and pop.

At MIT, PDL used to be a more common synonym for stack in all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere else stack seems to be the preferred term. Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:

Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!

Jargon File 4.2.0
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stack

c.1300, "pile, heap, or group of things," from O.N. stakkr "haystack" (cf. Dan. stak, Swed. stack "heap, stack"), from P.Gmc. *stakkoz, from PIE *stognos- (cf. O.C.S. stogu "heap," Rus. stog "haystack," Lith. stokas "pillar"), from base *steg- "pole, stick" (see stake (n.)). Meaning "set of shelves on which books are set out" is from 1879. Used of the chimneys of factories, locomotives, etc., since 1825. The verb is attested from c.1325, "to pile up grain;" the meaning "arrange unfairly" (in stack the deck) is first recorded 1825. Stack up "compare against" is 1903, from notion of piles of poker chips (1896). Stacked, of women's bodies, "well-built in a sexual sense" is from 1942.

stack (stāk) Pronunciation Key
An isolated, columnar mass or island of rock along a coastal cliff. Stacks are formed by the erosion of cliffs through wave action and are larger than chimneys.

stack programming
(See below for synonyms) A data structure for storing items which are to be accessed in last-in first-out order.
The operations on a stack are to create a new stack, to "push" a new item onto the top of a stack and to "pop" the top item off. Error conditions are raised by attempts to pop an empty stack or to push an item onto a stack which has no room for further items (because of its implementation).
Most processors include support for stacks in their instruction set architectures. Perhaps the most common use of stacks is to store subroutine arguments and return addresses. This is usually supported at the machine code level either directly by "jump to subroutine" and "return from subroutine" instructions or by auto-increment and auto-decrement addressing modes, or both. These allow a contiguous area of memory to be set aside for use as a stack and use either a special-purpose register or a general purpose register, chosen by the user, as a stack pointer.
The use of a stack allows subroutines to be recursive since each call can have its own calling context, represented by a stack frame or activation record. There are many other uses. The programming language Forth uses a data stack in place of variables when possible.
Although a stack may be considered an object by users, implementations of the object and its access details differ. For example, a stack may be either ascending (top of stack is at highest address) or descending. It may also be "full" (the stack pointer points at the top of stack) or "empty" (the stack pointer points just past the top of stack, where the next element would be pushed). The full/empty terminology is used in the Acorn Risc Machine and possibly elsewhere.
In a list-based or functional language, a stack might be implemented as a linked list where a new stack is an empty list, push adds a new element to the head of the list and pop splits the list into its head (the popped element) and tail (the stack in its modified form).
At MIT, pdl used to be a more common synonym for stack, and this may still be true. Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:
Many people who realised the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, dumps, nesting stores, piles, last-in first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!
[The Jargon File]
(1995-04-10)

stack

In addition to the idioms beginning with stack, also see blow one's top (stack); cards are stacked; needle in a haystack; swear on a stack of bibles;.

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