stank
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: enpr: stăngk
ipa: /stæŋk/
rhymes: -æŋk
Forms: form: stanks
form: stanking
form: stanked
form: stanked
Etymology: From Old French estanc, (French étang), from Latin stagnum (“a pool”). Compare stagnant, stagnate.
Senses: examples: text: Water-courses are stanked where they take a sharp turn, to prevent the force of the current wearing away the bank at the outside angle.
ref: 1881, John Edwin Cussans, History of Hertfordshire - Volume 3, page 321:
text: 'Have you ever seen such a mighty river before?' 'No , I answered, 'but I knew him when he was a wee thing, a child like myself, and I have stanked him often at his sylvan source with a few small stones, and the very first vessel he ever floated was a little boat I made of a pea-pod.'
ref: 1881, Zacharias Topelius, Whisperings in the wood, page 92:
text: The water had been stanked most carefully , and confined within its banks by soil and turf.
ref: 1888, Fores's Sporting Notes & Sketches, page 45:
text: The sewer was then stanked off at both sides of the passage by brickwork and its reconstruction commenced.
ref: 1912, W. Hemming Jones, “The Brocklebank Dock Improvements on the Mersey Dock Estate”, in Transactions of the Liverpool Engineering Society, volume 33, page 170:
text: Mr. Hownslow was a man who lived at the Chequers Inn, and one night coming home from Charlbury, in the narrow part of Spelsbury Lane he fell down and stanked ( blocked ) the water and was drowned.
ref: 1962, Elsie Corbett, A History of Spelsbury, page 263:
text: Rejoining the Stroudwater Canal near Lockham Bridge you can either turn left for a hundred yards or so past the concrete pillbox installed during the Second World War to where the canal is stanked off or omit this short section of canal altogether and turn right along the canal towards Bristol Road.
ref: 2013, Michael Handford, The Stroudwater Navigation Through Time:
text: The stop-planks which had for so long stanked off the waters of the summit level at South Ketton Bridge were then lifted.
ref: 2015, L.T.C. Rolt, Winterstoke:
glosses: To dam up; to block the flow of water or other liquid.
examples: text: They never dreamed of using a float; I doubt if there was such a thing in the whole valley; but they “stanked' their rods in the bank, with the line heavily shotted and arranged so that the hook was just clear of the bottom, the line being at right angles to the point of the rod.
ref: 1895, G. Christopher Davies, “The Dee”, in The Badminton Magazine of Sports & Pastimes, volume 1, page 251:
text: Should the depth of water on a vessel's deck be considered too deep for this method, the ship has to be stanked, or raised upon–that is to say, balks of timber have to be bolted or secured to her waterways; thick planks have to be fastened to the balks, so that they come above water, and then they are decked across, and the whole is made watertight with canvas or oakum.
ref: 1898, Captain James Bell, “Raising Sunken Vessels”, in Cassier's Magazine: An Engineering Monthly, volume 14, page 331:
text: I see your little desert-busted ankle boots and holy kid blankets, winter uniforms all stanked in must and I can't sleep here and I love your crap and I can't make a bed without you— the fitted sheet is a one-person nightmare.
ref: 2018, Derrick C. Brown, Hello. It Doesn't Matter.:
glosses: To pack in tightly.
examples: text: The writer was obliged, a few months ago, to open out a whole district which had been "stanked off " ( as the phrase of the district is ) for over a year, and on approaching the old air-way the heat became intolerable and the fire was burning as badly as ever.
ref: 1884, North of England Institute of Mining Engineers, Transactions - Volume 33, page 155:
text: From your experience then, taking into account the fact that you have a fiery and dusty mine to deal with, would you prefer to stank off as soon as there is the slightest evidence of any natural heating, either by smell or vapour or anything else, or would you prefer to run the risk of having to cope with filling out a large quantity of debris to get at the fire?
ref: 1916, Great Britain. Home Office, First Report of the Departmental Committee on Spontaneous Combustion of Coal in Mines, page 176:
text: If a gob-fire were more or less effectively stanked off, so that they had plenty of time for the work, he could quite see what a very useful adjunct cementation would be in that case.
ref: 1917, Institution of Mining Engineers (Great Britain), Transactions - Volume 53, page 32:
text: The process of methane removal at the pretreatment or exploitation stage, or methane outlets from the stanked areas, are carried out in about half of them.
ref: 1996, T.S. Golosinski, Guo Yuguang, Mining Science and Technology, page 19:
topics: business
mining
glosses: To seal off an area of the mine in which a fire has started.