Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

stacks

nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,035 of 15,258neutral

The stacks are the rows of shelving where books are stored. In the stacks, closed stacks, work in the stacks.

Open stacks let readers walk in and browse; closed stacks are staff only and books are fetched on request, which is how the great deposit libraries hold millions of volumes. Rolling stacks run on rails so that only one aisle is open at a time.

Foto: Jonn Leffmann · CC BY 3.0

Definitions of stacks

  1. 1nounstacksThe rows of shelving where books are stored.C1

    “The librarian went down to the stacks to find the old newspapers.”

stacks is shelving.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *(s)teg- (pole)

  2. Dutch

    stapel

  3. Proto-Germanic

    *stakkaz — a barn; rick; haystack

  4. Old Norse

    stakkr — a barn; haystack; heap; pile

  5. Middle English

    stack

  6. English

    stack

  7. English, today

    stacks

stack comes from Middle English stack, stacke, stakke, stak, from Old Norse stakkr (“a barn; haystack; heap; pile”), from Proto-Germanic stakkaz (“a barn; rick; haystack”). The data structure sense is a Dutch stapel, introduced by Edsger W. Dijkstra. Cognate with Icelandic stakkur (“stack”), Swedish stack (“stack”), Danish stak (“stack”), Norwegian stakk (“stack”). Related to stake and sauna.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Libraries & Museums

Practise this word

stacks in the wild

  • Despite their name, it is possible that there were never 12 rock stacks.

    The Twelve Apostles (Victoria)

  • Seven of the original nine stacks remain standing.

    The Twelve Apostles (Victoria)

  • The principal subject of each painting in the series is stacks of harvested wheat.

    Haystacks (Monet series)

  • Stacks are used to formalise some of the main constructions of descent theory, and to construct fine moduli stacks when fine moduli spaces do not exist.

    Stack (mathematics)

  • The Pinnacles are two chalk stacks located near Handfast Point, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, southern England.

    The Pinnacles (Dorset)

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the stakkr family

stackstacks

stacks — used about once every 1,710 pages · #6,035 · point at the bar for the others