Other forms: piles, piled, piling
A pile is a heap of things resting on one another. The plates by the sink, the leaves raked to the edge of the lawn, the unopened post building up on the mat.
A pile is loose and a stack is neat: you stack chairs, you pile laundry on a chair. It also means a large amount, and in the plural it means loads — a pile of work, piles of money. The verb is where the worry lives: bills pile up, washing piles up, and people pile into a car or pile on the pressure. In building, a pile is something else entirely, a long post driven deep into soft ground to hold a bridge or a tower up.
1nounpileA number of things lying loosely on top of one another.~48%
“A pile of newspapers sat by the door.”
2nounlargeA large amount of something.~2%
“I have a pile of marking to do this weekend.”
3verbputTo put things one on top of another.~2%
“She piled the dishes into the sink and left them.”
4nounheavyA heavy post driven into the ground to support a building or bridge.~48%
“The pier rests on concrete piles sunk into the seabed.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
pile is a heap.
Also accepted in games: heap
Pile comes from Latin pila, a pillar or a pier, by way of Old French pile. The starting picture is not a heap at all but a post standing in the ground, which is why the supports under a bridge are still called piles.
Proto-Indo-European
*peys-
Latin
pīla#pillar-pier-Latin — pillar, pier
Old French
pile
Middle English
pyle
English, today
pile
From Middle English pyle, from Old French pile, from Latin pīla#pillar-pier-Latin (“pillar, pier”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA