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

stopcock

UK/ˈstɒpkɒk/US/ˈstɑpkɑk/
nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Other forms: stopcocks

A stopcock is the valve that shuts off a building's water. Find the stopcock.

Everybody should know where theirs is before a pipe bursts rather than afterwards. A stopcock left unturned for years usually seizes, which is why it is worth exercising once a season.

MovGP0 · CC BY 3.0

Definitions of stopcock

  1. 1nounstopcockThe valve that shuts off a building's water.C1

    “When the pipe burst, we turned off the stopcock under the kitchen sink.”

stopcock is a valve.

Where it comes from

Stop plus cock, from the old sense of cock as a tap, which survives in stopcock and ballcock.

From stop + cock.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Tools & DIY

Practise this word

stopcock in the wild

  • The flow of liquid from the tube to the burette tip is controlled by the stopcock valve.

    Burette

  • A test for settleable solids in water, wastewater and stormwater uses an Imhoff cone, with or without stopcock.

    Imhoff tank

  • The common stopcock is the simplest form of rotary valve.

    Rotary valve

  • A stopcock is a form of valve used to control the flow of a liquid or gas.

    Stopcock

  • There is often a mechanism limiting motion of the handle to a quarter turn, but not in glass stopcocks.

    Plug valve

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.