Stockpile

How to spell stockpile

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stockpile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stockpile mean?

1. nounA large reserve supply of something accumulated and stored for future use.
2. verbTo accumulate and store a large reserve supply of something.

Stockpile in a sentence

• noun

  The warehouse held a vast stockpile of canned food and bottled water.

• verb

  Shoppers began to stockpile flour and pasta ahead of the lockdown.

• noun

  The country reduced its stockpile of outdated weapons.

• verb

  The clinic decided to stockpile vaccines for the winter months.

Where does stockpile come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Stockpile is a relatively modern English compound, first recorded in the early twentieth century in the language of mining and manufacturing, where it named a reserve heap of coal, ore, or raw material kept ready for use. Its first element, 'stock', comes from the Old English 'stocc', which originally meant a tree trunk or post and later broadened to mean a stored supply of goods, the sense preserved in 'stock market' and 'taking stock'. The second element, 'pile', came into English from Old French and ultimately from the Latin 'pila', meaning a pillar or a packed mass, which shifted in everyday use to mean simply a heap of things gathered together. Put together, the two halves describe exactly what the word means: a supply piled up in reserve. Because both parts are short, familiar everyday words joined without any spelling change, the compound is written as one solid word with no hyphen and no doubled letter at the join.

How the word is built

• stock (a store or supply)
• pile (a heap or accumulation)