Stock

How to spell stock

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stock

What does stock mean?

1. nounA quantity of goods or materials kept available for sale or use.
2. nounA share or shares in the ownership and capital of a company.
3. nounA savoury liquid made by simmering bones, meat, or vegetables, used as a base for soups and sauces.
4. verbTo keep a supply of something available for sale or use.

Stock in a sentence

• noun

  The warehouse keeps a large stock of spare parts.

• noun

  She sold her stock in the company before prices fell.

• noun

  She simmered the chicken bones for hours to make a rich stock.

• verb

  Most supermarkets stock a wide range of imported cheeses.

• noun

  The shop ran out of stock before the sale ended.

• noun

  The value of the stock rose sharply after the earnings report.

Where does stock come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, coming from the Old English stocc, which meant a tree trunk, a wooden post, or a solid block of wood. The same Germanic root sits behind the modern German Stock, meaning a stick or staff, and behind English words like stoke and stuck. From the literal sense of a fixed wooden block the meaning branched out in many directions: the wooden frame in which a gun barrel sits, the wooden stocks used to punish wrongdoers, the trunk of a family or breeding line, and, most usefully for commerce, a fixed store of goods kept on hand. By the 1600s it had stretched into finance, where a company's capital, divided into shares, was called its stock. Despite all these meanings the spelling has stayed reassuringly simple, since the word never passed through French and kept its blunt one-syllable shape.

How the word is built

• stoc (Old English stocc: tree trunk, post, block)
• no suffix