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stack

[stak]

Example Sentences Origin

noun

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

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

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

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

a number of chimneys or flues grouped together.

EXPAND

smokestack.

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

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

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

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

COLLAPSE

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, especially 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.

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Stack is one of our favorite verbs.

So is peculate. Does it mean:

to flee; abscond:

to steal or take dishonestly (money, esp. public funds, or property entrusted to one's care); embezzle.

LEARN MORE FUN, UNUSUAL VERBS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

verb (used without object)

21.

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

Verb phrase

22.

stack up,

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

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

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, especially to display one's fury, as by shouting: When he came in and saw the mess he blew his stack.

24.

stack the deck,

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

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

Origin:
1250–1300; (noun) Middle English stak < Old Norse stakkr haystack; (v.) Middle English stakken, derivative of the v.

Related forms

stack·er, noun

stack·less, adjective

re·stack, verb (used with object)

un·stack, adjective, verb

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To stack

Example Sentences

Deal out of the stack all of the bibliography cards, putting them in alphabetical order for easy use later.

While grading a stack of essays she gave the ones that.

Make sure that all of the cards are lined up evenly in the stack.

EXPAND

Deal out of the stack all of the bibliography cards, putting them in alphabetical order for easy use later.

While grading a stack of essays she gave the ones that.

Make sure that all of the cards are lined up evenly in the stack.

How drugs stack up against talk therapy for the treatment of depression.

Stack the rolled pieces on a plate as you complete the process.

With a long, sharp knife, cut stack across the narrow.

The air-cooled stack in the fuel cell system uses polymer.

Gauging effective teaching can be a little harder than measuring a stack of publications.

With distributed computing the industry became a stack of horizontal layers.

The result should be a stack with all five maps in alignment and all five regions demarcated by the students visible at once.

For clean coal they have symmetrically aligned stack of molecules coming out of two cooling towers.

For thirty years or so, one corner of our garage has been taken up by a big stack of business boxes, covered with plastic.

I've watched a young friend barely old enough to write turn them out by the stack.

After all, anyone hiring new personnel during a recession can expect to get a stack of resumes a mile high.

Critics say the new policy will stack the test in favor of students from families with enough money to take the test repeatedly.

Economic forecasts are being revised downwards almost as fast as the sandbags stack up in the streets.

The outer layer of fully grown bones is a stack of lines.

So if you want to keep your employees fixed on their goals, keep a stack of money on their desks.

All you need is a stack of hot corn tortillas to sop up the delicious juices.

Everyone has a stack of cards with various animals on them, and takes turns flipping them over in front of them.

It would be nice to see how different doctoral programs stack up by in general, by specific areas, etc.

The oil pressure will force it up into the heart of the stack of valves.

See how the world's biggest economies stack up on emissions with an interactive map.

The same thing happened to me with a stack of pancakes.

Bake the rounds, whip the cream, and stack with layers of jam for an impressive dessert in about an hour.

Get enough of these open protcols into decent shape and someone is likely to build them into an improbably powerful stack.

Don't keep a hot plate inches away from a large stack of papers.

Another cuts them into planks, which his mate tosses onto a rising stack.

Grab a stack of white paper and a pair of scissors.

Stack six of them into two groups of three and epoxy them to bolts.

Nearby, a stack of giant round metal baskets sits atop billowing jets of steam.

For what has stoked their fires isn't flesh or cash but stack upon precious stack of manga.

The are a uniform size and therefore will stack easily.

Tempting as such a theory is, the evidence does not quite stack up.

With pictures facing out, glue the postcards to the top and bottom of the folded stack of paper.

Next, there should be a birth defects study and cancer study in the stack shadows.

Cut and stack each fish fillet as needed to fit at the base of a leaf, leaving enough leaf open to enclose the fish.

It is also a fat stack of stunning eye candy for cultural anthropologists and comics nerds alike.

However, a good contact at a company can help you rise to the top of a stack of résumés a lot quicker.

Then there was the blowout preventer, a huge stack of valves on the sea floor.

In a corner a stack of folded blankets waits for winter.

The advantage is that photons would not need to penetrate the thermocouple layers, and so a stack of cells could be used.

My desk earlier today, with the stack of contest entries.

Take a collapsible wire-mesh and canvas screen and fill it with dirt, stack and repeat.

As if framing a loaded question weren't enough, they stack the deck, a couple of different ways.

Its steamer trunks with their flat tops were designed to stack neatly into cargo holds and rapidly replaced domed.

When a city floods, humans stack sandbags and raise levees.

We said the cube appears to be a stack of cubies, but appearances here are deceptive.

We ended up with a stack of creamy white and light yellow wax discs to use in cosmetics.

And you'll need a warranty because the fuel cell stack is destined to foul and need replacement in five to ten years.

For example, are you looking with dismay at a big stack of applications, wondering how you'll get through them.

Evidence for the existence of dark matter begins to stack up.

Some guys stack pots on their food bags so that if a bear comes into camp, the pots fall off and wake them up".

Leeson spoke to us recently about his research and how modern-day pirates stack up against their golden-age counterparts.

He went on to build a stack of alternating copper and zinc discs.

Stack on top of that if a student needs a graduate degree.

Never mind all the academic papers written on how best to stack shelves, retailers have their own views.

It apparently went right down the stack beside the ammunition hold.

Japanese scientists have already figured out how to grow watermelons in the shape of squares so they stack and ship easier.

The easiest way to see how things stack up is to check our chart, below.

The president's desk is now merely a place to stack papers-he never sits there.

It is of course more natural to blow your stack in your native language.

Also in the stack of papers is a photo of my grandfather toward the end of his life, dapper in his suit.

Yellow means it's a stack of my notes, and blue tells me that these are handouts.

Actually, it's in my stack of books to read right now.

Maybe using regular old email is the equivalent of putting the graded stack of papers in the hallway for people to pick up.

Peats were taken in from the peat stack so that you had all the peats that you needed for the fire.

Unfortunately, some group will always be at the bottom of the grading stack and have a longer wait.

She always has a big stack of books on her nightstand so she can pick the perfect book to fit her mood.

I'd stopped in to browse her stack of old paperbacks, hoping to find a hefty potboiler to help kill the time.

Georgia is a small player at the table, left to stack small chips.

He handed over a thick stack of rubles and promised to deliver a snowmobile and an outboard motor.

COLLAPSE

Collins

World English Dictionary

stack (stæk)

—n
1.	an ordered pile or heap
2.	a large orderly pile of hay, straw, etc, for storage in the open air
3.	(often plural) library science compactly spaced bookshelves, used to house collections of books in an area usually prohibited to library users
4.	a number of aircraft circling an airport at different altitudes, awaiting their signal to land
5.	a large amount: a stack of work
6.	military a pile of rifles or muskets in the shape of a cone
7.	(Brit) a measure of coal or wood equal to 108 cubic feet
8.	chimney stack See smokestack
9.	a vertical pipe, such as the funnel of a ship or the soil pipe attached to the side of a building
10.	a high column of rock, esp one isolated from the mainland by the erosive action of the sea
11.	an area in a computer memory for temporary storage

—vb
12.	to place in a stack; pile: to stack bricks on a lorry
13.	to load or fill up with piles of something: to stack a lorry with bricks
14.	to control (a number of aircraft waiting to land at an airport) so that each flies at a different altitude
15.	stack the cards to prearrange the order of a pack of cards secretly so that the deal will benefit someone

[C13: from Old Norse stakkr haystack, of Germanic origin; related to Russian stog]

'stackable

—*adj*

'stacker

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

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.)).

EXPAND

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 early 14c., "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.

COLLAPSE

American Heritage

Science Dictionary

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.

FOLDOC

Computing Dictionary

stack definition

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!
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-10)

American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

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;.