stack

(stăk)

1. An orderly pile, especially one arranged in layers: a stack of newspapers. See Synonyms at heap.

2. A large, usually conical pile of straw or fodder arranged for outdoor storage.

3. Computers A section of memory and its associated registers used for temporary storage of information in which the item most recently stored is the first to be retrieved.

4. A group of three rifles supporting each other, butt downward and forming a cone.

a. A chimney or flue.

b. A group of chimneys arranged together.

6. A vertical exhaust pipe, as on a ship or locomotive.

7. stacks

a. An extensive arrangement of bookshelves.

b. The area of a library in which most of the books are shelved.

8. A stackup.

9. An English measure of coal or cut wood, equal to 108 cubic feet (3.06 cubic meters).

10. Informal A large quantity: a stack of work to do.

v. stacked, stack·ing, stacks

v.tr.

1. To arrange in a stack; pile.

2. To load or cover with stacks or piles: stacked the dishwasher.

a. Games To prearrange the order of (a deck of cards) so as to increase the chance of winning.

b. To prearrange or fix unfairly so as to favor a particular outcome: tried to stack the jury.

4. To direct (aircraft) to circle at different altitudes while waiting to land.

v.intr.

To form a stack: Make sure the boxes stack neatly against the wall.

Phrasal Verb:

stack up Informal

1. To measure up or equal: Their gift doesn't stack up against his.

2. To make sense; add up: Her report just doesn't stack up.

[Middle English stak, pile, heap, haystack, from Old Norse stakkr.]

stack′a·ble adj.

stack′er n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun	1.	stacks - a large number or amount; "made lots of new friends"; "she amassed stacks of newspapers" dozens, gobs, heaps, lashings, loads, lots, oodles, rafts, scads, scores, slews, tons, wads, piles large indefinite amount, large indefinite quantity - an indefinite quantity that is above the average in size or magnitude
	2.	stacks - storage space in a library consisting of an extensive arrangement of bookshelves where most of the books are stored depository library, library - a depository built to contain books and other materials for reading and study storage space - the area in any structure that provides space for storage plural, plural form - the form of a word that is used to denote more than one

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References in classic literature

This year the peasants were doing all the mowing for a third of the hay crop, and the village elder had come now to announce that the hay had been cut, and that, fearing rain, they had invited the counting-house clerk over, had divided the crop in his presence, and had raked together eleven stacks as the owner's share.

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Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything.

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I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam - a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts.

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Abundant grain lies stored in the byres, and great stacks of wheat are glowing comfortably in the morning sunlight.

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On all sides there were waste spaces with only stoves and chimney stacks still standing, and here and there the blackened walls of some brick houses.

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Against the twilight rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.

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At the top of the stairs, wide reaches of shadowy space led to far corners where the roof came almost down to the floor, and where were stacked innumerable trunks and boxes.

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They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds.

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'Tell him that Rupert Morrison rang up to ask what he was to do with all this great stack of music that's arrived.

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But one day, after the corn had all been cut and stacked, and Tip was carrying the pumpkins to the stable, he took a notion to make a "Jack Lantern" and try to give the old woman a fright with it.

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"Blest if the old Nonesuch ain't a heppin' us out agin," and HE begun to haul out yaller-jackets and stack them up.

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There were holsters for more pistols appended to the wonderful stack of long-haired goat-skins and Persian carpets, which the man had been taught to regard in the light of a saddle; and down among the pendulous rank of vast tassels that swung from that saddle, and clanging against the iron shovel of a stirrup that propped the warrior's knees up toward his chin, was a crooked, silver-clad scimitar of such awful dimensions and such implacable expression that no man might hope to look upon it and not shudder.

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