Stack

How to spell stack

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stack

What does stack mean?

1. nounAn orderly pile of objects laid one on top of another.
2. verbTo arrange objects in a neat pile, one on top of another.

Stack in a sentence

• noun

  A tall stack of paperwork waited on her desk.

• verb

  Please stack the chairs against the back wall after the meeting.

• noun

  He balanced the last plate on top of the stack.

• verb

  Warehouse staff stack the boxes carefully to save floor space.

Where does stack come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Stack comes from the Old Norse word stakkr, which meant a haystack or a heap of hay piled up for storage. Norse settlers brought the term into northern England during the Viking age, and by the 1300s it had settled into Middle English simply as a tidy pile of something. The original farming sense, a carefully built mound of hay or grain, broadened over the centuries to cover any orderly heap, from a stack of books to a stack of plates. The same root also gave us the related idea of a tall industrial chimney, a 'smokestack', because such a structure rises like a built-up column. The spelling is reassuringly phonetic: the short vowel and the hard final sound are captured by the -ck ending that English regularly uses after a short vowel.

How the word is built

• stack (whole root word, from Old Norse stakkr 'haystack'); no prefix or suffix