stool
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /stuːl/
ipa: /stʉl/
rhymes: -uːl
Forms: form: stools
form: stooling
form: stooled
form: stooled
Etymology: 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).
Senses: examples: text: 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.
ref: 1999, Judith Lauwers with Debbie Shinskie, Counseling the Nursing Mother: A Lactation Consultant's Guide, 3rd edition, Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, →ISBN, page 204:
text: 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.
ref: 2004, Gary A. Emmett, Field Guide to the Normal Newborn, Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, →ISBN, page 132:
text: 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.
ref: 2014, David R. Fleisher, Management of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders in Children: Biopsychosocial Concepts for Clinical Practice, New York, N.Y.: Springer, →ISBN, page 79:
topics: medicine
sciences
glosses: To produce stool: to defecate.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 2011, Edward F. Gilman, An Illustrated Guide to Pruning, 3rd edition, Clifton Park, N.Y.: Delmar, Cengage Learning, →ISBN, page 411:
text: 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.
ref: 2015 October 23, 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 29 Oct 2015:
topics: agriculture
business
horticulture
lifestyle
glosses: To cut down (a plant) until its main stem is close to the ground, resembling a stool, to promote new growth.
Synonyms: defecate