stack

[stak] /stæk/
noun
1.
a more or less orderly pile or heap:
a precariously balanced stack of books; a neat stack of papers.
2.
a large, usually conical, circular, or rectangular pile of hay, straw, or the like.
3.
Often, stacks. a set of shelves for books or other materials ranged compactly one above the other, as in a library.
4.
stacks, the area or part of a library in which the books and other holdings are stored or kept.
5.
a number of chimneys or flues grouped together.
6.
smokestack.
7.
a vertical duct for conveying warm air from a leader to a register on an upper story of a building.
8.
a vertical waste pipe or vent pipe serving a number of floors.
9.
Informal. a great quantity or number.
10.
Radio. an antenna consisting of a number of components connected in a substantially vertical series.
11.
Computers. a linear list arranged so that the last item stored is the first item retrieved.
12.
Military. a conical, free-standing group of three rifles placed on their butts and hooked together with stacking swivels.
13.
Also called air stack, stackup. Aviation. a group of airplanes circling over an airport awaiting their turns to land.
14.
an English measure for coal and wood, equal to 108 cubic feet (3 cu. m).
15.
Geology. a column of rock isolated from a shore by the action of waves.
16.
Games.
  1. a given quantity of chips that can be bought at one time, as in poker or other gambling games.
  2. the quantity of chips held by a player at a given point in a gambling game.
verb (used with object)
17.
to pile, arrange, or place in a stack:
to stack hay; to stack rifles.
18.
to cover or load with something in stacks or piles.
19.
to arrange or select unfairly in order to force a desired result, especially to load (a jury, committee, etc.) with members having a biased viewpoint:
The lawyer charged that the jury had been stacked against his client.
20.
to keep (a number of incoming airplanes) flying nearly circular patterns at various altitudes over an airport where crowded runways, a low ceiling, or other temporary conditions prevent immediate landings.
verb (used without object)
21.
to be arranged in or form a stack:
These chairs stack easily.
Verb phrases
22.
stack up,
  1. Aviation. to control the flight patterns of airplanes waiting to land at an airport so that each circles at a designated altitude.
  2. Informal. to compare; measure up (often followed by against):
    How does the movie stack up against the novel?
  3. Informal. to appear plausible or in keeping with the known facts:
    Your story just doesn't stack up.
Idioms
23.
blow one's stack, Slang. to lose one's temper or become uncontrollably angry, especially to display one's fury, as by shouting:
When he came in and saw the mess he blew his stack.
24.
stack the deck,
  1. to arrange cards or a pack of cards so as to cheat:
    He stacked the deck and won every hand.
  2. to manipulate events, information, etc., especially unethically, in order to achieve an advantage or desired result.
Origin
1250-1300; (noun) Middle English stak < Old Norse stakkr haystack; (v.) Middle English stakken, derivative of the v.
Related forms
stacker, noun
stackless, adjective
restack, verb (used with object)
unstack, adjective, verb
Examples from the web for stack
  • Make sure that all of the cards are lined up evenly in the stack.
  • stack the rolled pieces on a plate as you complete the process.
  • Gauging effective teaching can be a little harder than measuring a stack of publications.
  • With distributed computing the industry became a stack of horizontal layers.
  • The result should be a stack with all five maps in alignment and all five regions demarcated by the students visible at once.
  • For clean coal they have symmetrically aligned stack of molecules coming out of two cooling towers.
  • After all, anyone hiring new personnel during a recession can expect to get a stack of resumes a mile high.
  • Economic forecasts are being revised downwards almost as fast as the sandbags stack up in the streets.
  • The outer layer of fully grown bones is a stack of lines.
  • So if you want to keep your employees fixed on their goals, keep a stack of money on their desks.
British Dictionary definitions for stack

stack

/stæk/
noun
1.
an ordered pile or heap
2.
a large orderly pile of hay, straw, etc, for storage in the open air
3.
(often pl) (library science) compactly spaced bookshelves, used to house collections of books in an area usually prohibited to library users
4.
a number of aircraft circling an airport at different altitudes, awaiting their signal to land
5.
a large amount: a stack of work
6.
(military) a pile of rifles or muskets in the shape of a cone
7.
(Brit) a measure of coal or wood equal to 108 cubic feet
8.
See chimney stack, smokestack
9.
a vertical pipe, such as the funnel of a ship or the soil pipe attached to the side of a building
10.
a high column of rock, esp one isolated from the mainland by the erosive action of the sea
11.
an area in a computer memory for temporary storage
verb (transitive)
12.
to place in a stack; pile: to stack bricks on a lorry
13.
to load or fill up with piles of something: to stack a lorry with bricks
14.
to control (a number of aircraft waiting to land at an airport) so that each flies at a different altitude
15.
stack the cards, to prearrange the order of a pack of cards secretly so that the deal will benefit someone
Derived Forms
stackable, adjective
stacker, noun
Word Origin
C13: from Old Norse stakkr haystack, of Germanic origin; related to Russian stog
Word Origin and History for stack
n.

c.1300, "pile, heap, or group of things," from Old Norse stakkr "haystack" (cf. Danish stak, Swedish stack "heap, stack"), from Proto-Germanic *stakkoz, from PIE *stognos- (cf. Old Church Slavonic stogu "heap," Russian stog "haystack," Lithuanian stokas "pillar"), from root *steg- "pole, stick" (see stake (n.)). Meaning "set of shelves on which books are set out" is from 1879. Used of the chimneys of factories, locomotives, etc., since 1825.

v.

early 14c., "to pile up grain," from stack (n.). Meaning "arrange unfairly" (in stack the deck) is first recorded 1825. Stack up "compare against" is 1903, from notion of piles of poker chips (1896). Related: Stacked; Stacking.

stack in Science
stack
  (stāk)   
An isolated, columnar mass or island of rock along a coastal cliff. Stacks are formed by the erosion of cliffs through wave action and are larger than chimneys.
Slang definitions & phrases for stack

stack

Related Terms

blow one's top


stack in Technology
programming
(See below for synonyms) A data structure for storing items which are to be accessed in last-in first-out order.
The operations on a stack are to create a new stack, to "push" a new item onto the top of a stack and to "pop" the top item off. Error conditions are raised by attempts to pop an empty stack or to push an item onto a stack which has no room for further items (because of its implementation).
Most processors include support for stacks in their instruction set architectures. Perhaps the most common use of stacks is to store subroutine arguments and return addresses. This is usually supported at the machine code level either directly by "jump to subroutine" and "return from subroutine" instructions or by auto-increment and auto-decrement addressing modes, or both. These allow a contiguous area of memory to be set aside for use as a stack and use either a special-purpose register or a general purpose register, chosen by the user, as a stack pointer.
The use of a stack allows subroutines to be recursive since each call can have its own calling context, represented by a stack frame or activation record. There are many other uses. The programming language Forth uses a data stack in place of variables when possible.
Although a stack may be considered an object by users, implementations of the object and its access details differ. For example, a stack may be either ascending (top of stack is at highest address) or descending. It may also be "full" (the stack pointer points at the top of stack) or "empty" (the stack pointer points just past the top of stack, where the next element would be pushed). The full/empty terminology is used in the Acorn Risc Machine and possibly elsewhere.
In a list-based or functional language, a stack might be implemented as a linked list where a new stack is an empty list, push adds a new element to the head of the list and pop splits the list into its head (the popped element) and tail (the stack in its modified form).
At MIT, pdl used to be a more common synonym for stack, and this may still be true. Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:
Many people who realised the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, dumps, nesting stores, piles, last-in first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-10)
Idioms and Phrases with stack

stack

also see:
;.