Pile

How to spell pile

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pile

What does pile mean?

1. nounA quantity of things laid or thrown one on top of another to form a raised mass.
2. verbTo place or load things on top of one another, or to crowd in a disorderly way.
3. nounA long heavy column of timber, steel, or concrete driven into the ground to support a building or bridge.
4. nounThe soft raised surface of threads on a carpet, rug, or fabric such as velvet.

Pile in a sentence

• noun

  A pile of unopened letters sat on the kitchen counter.

• verb

  Please do not pile heavy boxes on the glass table.

• noun

  Engineers drove each concrete pile deep into the riverbed before construction began.

• noun

  The deep pile of the new carpet felt soft underfoot.

• noun

  She sorted the laundry into one pile for darks and one for whites.

• verb

  The children pile into the back of the car before the trip.

Where does pile come from?

Language of origin: Latin

English actually carries several different words spelled 'pile' that arrived by separate routes and later blurred together. The most familiar sense, a heap, comes from the Latin pila, which meant a stone pier, mole, or pillar, and reached English through Old French during the 1400s, gradually shifting from 'a built-up mass of masonry' to any mound of stacked things. The construction sense, a heavy post driven into the ground, descends from the Latin pilum, the javelin carried by Roman soldiers, which gave Old English pil for a pointed stake. A third, quieter sense, the soft raised surface of a carpet or velvet, comes from the Latin pilus meaning 'a hair'. Because all three roots collapsed onto the same short spelling, 'pile' is a rare case where one tidy four-letter word hides three unrelated Latin ancestors, which is also why the spelling itself gives modern writers almost no trouble.

How the word is built

• pile (single root, no affixes; from Latin pila 'pillar' and pilum 'spike')