stack
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /stæk/
rhymes: -æk
Forms: form: stacks
form: stacking
form: stacked
form: stacked
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.
Senses: examples: text: Please stack those chairs in the corner.
text: 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.
ref: 2013 January 22, Phil McNulty, “Aston Villa 2-1 Bradford (3-4)”, in BBC:
text: 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.
ref: 2013 July-August, Catherine Clabby, “Focus on Everything”, in American Scientist:
synonyms: word: build up
word: stack up
word: accumulate
word: agglomerate
word: amass
word: build up
word: cumulate
word: heap
word: heap up
word: mound
word: pile
word: pile up
word: rack up
word: stack
word: stack up
word: upheap
glosses: To arrange in a stack, or to add to an existing stack.
examples: text: This is the third hand in a row where you've drawn four of a kind. Someone is stacking the deck!
topics: card-games
games
glosses: To arrange the cards in a deck in a particular manner, especially for cheating.
examples: text: to be stacked against (someone)
text: The Government was accused of stacking the parliamentary committee.
text: 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.
ref: 2017 July 26, Lindsay Murdoch, “Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand's first female PM, faces financial ruin and jail”, in The Sydney Morning Herald:
text: Many citizens support the recent attacks on democracy, and those who don’t face a system stacked against them.
ref: 2021 July 14, David A. Graham, “Biden Is Speaking to an America That Doesn’t Exist”, in The Atlantic:
glosses: To arrange or fix to obtain an advantage; to deliberately distort the composition of (an assembly, committee, etc.).
examples: text: I won Jill's last $100 this hand; I stacked her!
topics: card-games
poker
glosses: To take all the money another player currently has on the table.
examples: text: Jim couldn′t make it today as he stacked his car on the weekend.
text: 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.
text: Marmalade: Who stacked the car? (pointing to Saloon) Fangio here. / Jock: (standing) I claim full responsibility for the second bingle.
ref: 1984, Jack Hibberd, A Country Quinella: Two Celebration Plays, page 80:
text: 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.
ref: 2002, Ernest Keen, Depression: Self-Consciousness, Pretending, and Guilt, page 19:
text: 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
synonyms: smash
wreck
glosses: To crash; to fall.
examples: text: 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.
topics: games
gaming
glosses: To operate cumulatively.
topics: aeronautics
aerospace
aviation
business
engineering
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
glosses: To place (aircraft) into a holding pattern.
glosses: To collect precious metal in the form of various small objects such as coins and bars.
topics: media
printing
publishing
antonyms: skip
glosses: To have excessive ink transfer.
Derived terms: destack
stack-and-pack
stack off
stack the cards
stack the deck
stack z's
unstack
Related terms: stackable
stacked
stack it
unstack