Pile vs Stack - What's the difference?
pile | stack |
(obsolete) A dart; an arrow.
The head of an arrow or spear.
A large stake, or piece of pointed timber, steel etc., driven into the earth or sea-bed for the support of a building, a pier, or other superstructure, or to form a cofferdam, etc.
* {{quote-book, year=1719
, edition=10th edition
, year_published=1864
, author=
, title=
, chapter=
, section=Chapter VI
(heraldiccharge) One of the ordinaries or subordinaries having the form of a wedge, usually placed palewise, with the broadest end uppermost.
To drive s into; to fill with piles; to strengthen with piles.
A mass of things heaped together; a heap.
* {{quote-book, year=1889
, author=
, title=
, volume_plain=Book II: The Fall of Harmachis
, section=Chapter XI
(figuratively, informal) A group or list of related items up for consideration, especially in some kind of selection process.
* {{quote-news, year=2011
, date=December 29
, author=Keith Jackson
, title=SPL: Celtic 1 Rangers 0
, work=Daily Record
A mass formed in layers.
A funeral pile; a pyre.
A large building, or mass of buildings.
* Dryden
* 1817 , (Walter Scott), Rob Roy , II.2:
* Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved
A bundle of pieces of wrought iron to be worked over into bars or other shapes by rolling or hammering at a welding heat; a fagot.
A vertical series of alternate disks of two dissimilar metals, as copper and zinc, laid up with disks of cloth or paper moistened with acid water between them, for producing a current of electricity; — commonly called Volta’s pile, voltaic pile, or galvanic pile.
(obsolete) The reverse (or tails) of a coin.
(figuratively) A list or league
* '>citation
To lay or throw into a pile or heap; to heap up; to collect into a mass; to accumulate; to amass; — often with up; as, to pile up wood.
To cover with heaps; or in great abundance; to fill or overfill; to load.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=70, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= To add something to a great number.
* {{quote-news, year=2010, date=December 28, author=Owen Phillips, work=BBC
, title= (of vehicles) To create a hold-up.
(military) To place (guns, muskets, etc.) together in threes so that they can stand upright, supporting each other.
Hair, especially when very fine or short; the fine underfur of certain animals. (Formerly countable, now treated as a collective singular.)
The raised hairs, loops or strands of a fabric; the nap of a cloth.
* (William Cowper)
(lb) A pile.
#A large pile of hay, grain, straw, or the like, larger at the bottom than the top, sometimes covered with thatch.
#*(William Cowper) (1731-1800)
#*:But corn was housed, and beans were in the stack .
#A pile of similar objects, each directly on top of the last.
#:
#(lb) A pile of poles or wood, indefinite in quantity.
#*(Francis Bacon) (1561-1626)
#*:Against every pillar was a stack of billets above a man's height.
#A pile of wood containing 108 cubic feet. (~3 m³)
A smokestack.
*
*:With just the turn of a shoulder she indicated the water front, where, at the end of the dock on which they stood, lay the good ship, Mount Vernon , river packet, the black smoke already pouring from her stacks .
(lb) In digital computing.
#A linear data structure in which the last data item stored is the first retrieved; a LIFO queue.
#A portion of computer memory occupied by a stack' data structure, particularly (' the stack ) that portion of main memory manipulated during machine language procedure call related instructions.
#*1992 , Michael A. Miller, The 68000 Microprocessor Family: Architecture, Programming, and Applications , p.47:
#*:When the microprocessor decodes the JSR opcode, it stores the operand into the TEMP register and pushes the current contents of the PC ($00 0128) onto the stack .
(lb) A coastal landform, consisting of a large vertical column of rock in the sea.
(senseid)(lb) Compactly spaced bookshelves used to house large collections of books.
(lb) A large amount of an object.
:
(lb) A pile of rifles or muskets in a cone shape.
(lb) The amount of money a player has on the table.
(lb) In architecture.
#A number of flues embodied in one structure, rising above the roof.
#A vertical drainpipe.
A fall or crash, a prang.
(lb) A blend of various dietary supplements or anabolic steroids with supposed synergistic benefits.
At Caltech, a lock, obstacle, or puzzle designed to prevent underclassmen from entering a senior's room during ditch day.
To arrange in a stack, or to add to an existing stack.
* {{quote-news, year=2013, date=January 22, author=Phil McNulty, work=BBC
, title= * {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=July-August, author=
, magazine=(American Scientist), title= (card games) To arrange the cards in a deck in a particular manner.
(poker) To take all the money another player currently has on the table.
To deliberately distort the composition of (an assembly, committee, etc.).
(transitive, US, Australia, slang) To crash; to fall.
* 1975 , Laurie Clancy, A Collapsible Man , Outback Press,
* 1984 , , A Country Quinella: Two Celebration Plays ,
* 2002 , Ernest Keen, Depression: Self-Consciousness, Pretending, and Guilt ,
* 2007 , Martin Chipperfield, slut talk'', ''Night Falling , 34th Parallel Publishing, US, Trade Paperback,
Stack is a synonym of pile.
In transitive terms the difference between pile and stack
is that pile is (of vehicles) To create a hold-up while stack is to deliberately distort the composition of (an assembly, committee, etc.).In figuratively terms the difference between pile and stack
is that pile is a list or league while stack is a large amount of an object.pile
English
Etymology 1
(etyl) . Cognate with Dutch pijl, German Pfeil.Noun
(en noun)citation, page=68 , passage=All this time I worked very hard [...] and it is scarce credible what inexpressible labour everything was done with, especially the bringing piles out of the woods and driving them into the ground; for I made them much bigger than I needed to have done.}}
Derived terms
* pile bridge * pile cap * pile driver * pile dwelling * pile engine * pile plank * pneumatic pile * screw pileVerb
(pil)Etymology 2
Apparently from pilus.Etymology 3
From (etyl) pile, (pille), from (etyl) .Noun
(en noun)citation, isbn=1555211224 , page= , passage=I climbed through, and, standing on a pile of stones, lifted and dragged Cleopatra after me.}}
- When we were looking for a new housemate, we put the nice woman on the "maybe" pile''', and the annoying guy on the "no" '''pile .
citation, page= , passage=And the moment it thumped into the net, Celtic’s march back to the top of the SPL pile also seemed unstoppable.}}
- a pile of shot
- (Dryden)
- The pile o'erlooked the town and drew the fight.
- The pile is of a gloomy and massive, rather than of an elegant, style of Gothic architecture
- It was dark when the four-wheeled cab wherein he had brought Avice from the station stood at the entrance to the pile of flats of which Pierston occupied one floor
- Watch Harlequins train and you get some idea of why they are back on top of the pile going into Saturday's rerun of last season's grand final against Leicester.
Synonyms
* See alsoVerb
(pil)Engineers of a different kind, passage=Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster.}}
Sunderland 0-2 Blackpool, passage=But as the second half wore on, Sunderland piled forward at every opportunity and their relentless pressure looked certain to be rewarded in the closing stages. }}
Etymology 4
Partly from (etyl) pil (a variant of peil, .Noun
(en noun)- Velvet soft, or plush with shaggy pile .
Anagrams
* English terms with multiple etymologies ----stack
English
(wikipedia stack)Noun
(en noun)Verb
(en verb)Aston Villa 2-1 Bradford (3-4), passage=James Hanson, the striker who used to stack shelves in a supermarket, flashed a superb header past Shay Given from Gary Jones's corner 10 minutes after the break.}}
Catherine Clabby
Focus on Everything, passage=Not long ago, it was difficult to produce photographs of tiny creatures with every part in focus.
page 43,
- Miserable phone calls from Windsor police station or from Russell Street. ‘Mum, I?ve stacked the car; could you get me a lawyer?’, the middle-class panacea for all diseases.
page 80,
- MARMALADE Who stacked the car? (pointing to SALOON) Fangio here.
- JOCK (standing) I claim full responsibility for the second bingle.
page 19,
- Eventually he sideswiped a bus and forced other cars to collide, and as he finally stacked the car up on a bridge abutment, he passed out, perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps from his head hitting the windshield.
page 100,
- oh shit danny, i stacked' the car / ran into sally, an old school friend / you ' stacked the car? / so now i need this sally?s address / for the insurance, danny says