stall
Pluralstalls
Pluralstalls
Formsstalls, stalling, stalled
- 1A small open-fronted shop, such as one set up in a market or food court.
The flower stall on the corner opens before dawn each day.
Tourists crowded around a stall selling handmade leather goods.
Note
Market stalls and food-court stalls are small businesses in their own right, and the word names the trade as much as the structure: the people who run them are stall operators. Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900) looks "into the stalls" for a butcher. The bench of goods is what the trader lays out; this is the shop around it.
- 2A compartment in a stable or cattle shed that holds a single animal.
She mucked out every stall before the morning feed.
The new foal was moved into a wider stall.
Note
The root sense, closest to the word's origin: Old English steall meant a standing place, from a root for placing and standing, and an animal's stall is exactly that, the spot where it is put to stand. German Stall and Swedish stall share the root, and boose names the same compartment. Most of the noun's other senses, from market stalls to choir stalls, are standing places too.
- 3A tiny enclosed compartment containing a shower or a toilet.
Only one stall in the restroom was working.
Steam filled the shower stall after his long run.
Similarcubicle, compartment
Note
Often met in a compound: shower stall, or a toilet stall in a public restroom. John Updike's Rabbit at Rest (1990) fits a Fiberglas tub and shower stall into one bathroom. The word stresses enclosure and size: a stall holds one person at a time, much as the stable compartment holds one animal.
- 4To come to a halt or standstill.
The talks stall whenever the subject of money comes up.
Reform efforts stalled after the leadership changed.
Similarfalter, stop, halt, stagnate, founder
Note
The standstill that begins with machines and spreads to plans. A 1960 issue of Trains Illustrated has a locomotive stall after a stop on Reading Old Bank, needing a second engine to push the train into Reading General; a 2023 report says rail projects "have stalled" with no funding in sight. Talks, reforms and projects stall as readily as trains.
- 5To use delaying tactics in order to gain time.
Defendants may stall until a key witness is unavailable.
He stalled by pretending not to understand the question.
Similartemporize, stonewall, prevaricate, filibuster
Note
The intransitive form, and the one with a fixed phrase: stall for time. The person stalling is the subject and nothing need follow, as in "she was stalling to give him time to get away"; KT Tunstall's "Saving My Face" (2007) stretches it to someone who keeps failing to leave. Add an object and it becomes stalling someone, as with creditors.
- 6To cause a manual car or truck's engine to stop by going too slowly for the gear you have selected.
She stalled the truck twice before getting it moving.
Letting the clutch out too fast will stall the engine.
Note
A driver's word, tied to the clutch and gearbox of a manual car or truck: let the clutch out too quickly, or give too little throttle, and engine speed drops below what the selected gear needs, so the engine dies. The driver is the subject and the vehicle or engine the object: she stalled the truck; you will stall the engine.
- 7An action meant to cause delay, or one that has that effect.
Her request for more documents was clearly a stall.
The endless points of order amounted to a stall.
Note
The delaying senses come through Middle English stallen, "to stop, come to a standstill," partly from Old French estaler, yet the root is the same one behind the stable stall, a place where things stand still. As a noun it counts: one evasive move is a stall, and a run of receptionists and assistants can all be stalls in turn.
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- 11The loss of lift that occurs when an airfoil exceeds its critical angle of attack, usually because of low airspeed.
The instructor demonstrated a stall at a safe altitude.
Sensors warn the crew before the wing reaches a stall.
Note
The aviator's stall has nothing to do with the engine, unlike the motorist's stall. Here the wing loses lift because air separates from its upper surface once the critical angle is passed; low airspeed is the usual cause, but the angle is what matters. A 1979 National Transportation Safety Board report traces one accident to an "asymmetric stall" after slats retracted on the left wing alone.
- 12A theater seat close to and roughly level with the stage; traditionally one with arms or partly enclosed, unlike the open benches.
She preferred a stall to a balcony seat for the opera.
The critic settled into his stall just as the curtain rose.
- 13A marked space for a single vehicle in a parking lot or parking garage.
The wider stall at the end makes loading groceries easier.
He backed his truck carefully into the narrow stall.
Note
A Canadian usage, at home beside parkade, the word for a parking garage that turns up in the same breath. The full phrase parking stall makes the meaning plain; once a lot is in view, stall alone will do. For readers outside Canada, who may not know it, the full phrase is the safer choice.
- 14Of an aircraft or wing, to lose lift because the critical angle of attack has been exceeded.
The wing stalled as the pilot pulled the nose up sharply.
Pilots practice what to do when a wing begins to stall at too steep an angle.
- 15To come to a sudden stop.
The elevator stalled between two floors and the lights flickered.
Heavy machines can stall the instant a belt jams.
Similarstop, halt, seize, jam, die
Note
Said above all of engines, which stall when they cut out without warning; elevators and machinery stall the same way. Nothing follows the verb. When a driver is the cause, English uses the transitive stalling a car instead.
- 16To make an aircraft lose lift by forcing its wings past the angle at which air still flows smoothly over them.
The pilot stalled the jet deliberately during the safety demonstration.
Pulling back too sharply will stall the wing and send the plane into a sudden descent.
Note
The pilot is the subject now: the wing stalls in the intransitive use, but here a person makes it stall, sometimes on purpose in a training demonstration. The object can be the plane, the jet or the wing itself. The classic mistake, pulling the nose up too high at a slow airspeed, shows how it happens by accident.
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- 18A seat in a church, especially one beside the chancel or choir, set aside for clergy and dignitaries.
Each canon occupied his own stall during the evening service.
The choir stalls were elaborately carved with scenes from scripture.
- 19A stable, or a sheltered compartment within one, used as a place for keeping cattle or other livestock.
The farmer mucked out the stall before bringing the cows in.
Fresh straw lined the stalls in the dairy barn.
Note
Here the word stretches from one compartment to the whole building. Dryden, retelling Chaucer in 1700, has a traveler find "a Stall where oxen stood" and choose it over sleeping in the open. Because the single-animal compartment uses the same word, the context has to make the scale plain.
- 20A protective sheath worn over a single finger to shield it from injury or infection.
After the operation, he wore a stall to keep the dressing clean.
Cobblers sometimes use a leather stall to guard the thumb while stitching.
- 21A church office whose holder is entitled to use a stall in the choir or chancel.
The new appointment came with a stall and a modest annual stipend.
He resigned his stall when he was promoted to a bishopric.
Note
The seat stands for the office: to hold a stall is to hold the post that comes with the choir seat. Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown's School Days (1857), sets "no fat living or stall" side by side as rewards a cleric might seek, and the Dumas translation of Celebrated Crimes speaks of a "prebendal stall." Prebendal is a natural companion for it.
- 22To induct someone into an office with the customary ceremony; to install.
The bishop stalled the canon before the assembled congregation.
They stall each new prebendary in a centuries-old rite.
Similarinstall, induct, instate
Note
Formal seating in office, the act that install still spells out around it. Shakespeare's Richard III has "Deck'd in thy rights, as thou art stall'd in mine": to be stalled in someone's rights is to be seated where they should sit. For a modern reader install is the word to use; stall in this sense reads as Elizabethan.
- 23To drive a vehicle or animal into mire or snow so that it sticks fast and cannot move on.
A careless teamster can stall a loaded wagon in the bog at the river crossing.
Two of the sled dogs were stalled in a drift nearly up to their shoulders.
Similarmire
Note
Often met in the passive, with snow or mud doing the stalling: Edward Everett Hale's The Fortunes of Rachel (1884) has "His horses had been stalled in the snow." The active form takes the vehicle as its object, as in "to stall a cart." Its intransitive twin, being stuck fast, has dropped out of use.
- 24The open space left by excavation between the pillars of rock that support a mine roof.
The team advanced the stall another ten feet before reinforcing the roof.
Old maps marked each stall and pillar throughout the worked-out seam.
Similarroom
Note
A miner's term from pillar-and-stall working, where coal or rock is cut away and pillars of it are left standing to hold up the roof. The stall is the worked-out space; the pillar is what remains. The two words travel together, and how wide each stall can be depends on the strength of the strata overhead.
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- 26To forestall something; to act in advance so as to prevent or anticipate it.
The treaty stalled a war that both sides had thought inevitable.
Merchants would stall a shortage by buying up grain early.
Similarforestall, prevent, avert, preempt
Note
The verb hiding inside forestall, used on its own to mean getting in ahead of something. Philip Massinger's The Bashful Lover (1636) spells it staled, "This is not to be staled by my report," so a reader of older texts should not mistake it for stale: the line is about a report getting ahead of the thing it describes.
- 27To keep something close and secret, holding it to oneself rather than revealing it to others.
Note
A private, almost domestic image from Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, where one character asks another to "stall this in your bosom": to put a confidence away there, as in its proper place, and tell no one. It belongs with the word's root sense of a fixed standing place. It means storing something away, not slowing it down, and has nothing to do with stalling for time, the meaning a modern reader hears first.
- 28An indoor Heathen altar, as distinguished from the larger outdoor altar known as a harrow.
Before the rite, she arranged offerings on the stall.
Many Heathens maintain a stall indoors and a harrow in the yard.
Note
Modern Heathen practice pairs it with harrow: the stall is the altar kept indoors, the harrow the more substantial one outside. Some Asatruar kindreds use exactly that division, and Mark Puryear's The Nature of Asatru (2006) glosses the form stalli simply as "altar." Edred Thorsson's A Book of Troth (1989) describes a ring drawn "before an indoor stall" in a private rite.
- 29To be housed in a stall or in something like one; to dwell.
I must perforce Haue ſhewne to thee ſuch a declining day, Or looke on thine: we could not ſtall together In the whole world.
c. 1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”Note
A word that has fallen out of use, kept alive by Shakespeare: in Antony and Cleopatra the line "we could not stall together / In the whole world" means the two of them could not both dwell in the world at once. The image is of two beasts that cannot share one stall. Today it is a deliberate archaism; in ordinary prose, dwell or live does the job.
- 30To become stuck fast, as in mire or snow, so as to be unable to move on.
The oxen stalled in the bog and could go no further.
Heavy coaches would stall on the flooded road each winter.
Note
This intransitive sense has dropped out of use: an ox or a coach once simply stalled in the bog. A writer reaching for the meaning today says get stuck, or uses the passive of the transitive verb, as in "his horses had been stalled in the snow."
- 31Of cattle, to become fed up with food and lose the urge to eat.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origins
From Middle English stall, from Old English steall ("standing place, position"), which traces back through Proto-Germanic *stallaz to the Proto-Indo-European root *stel- ("to place, put, stand"). It is related to French étal, German Stall, and Swedish stall.
From Middle English stallen ("to abide, dwell, stop, come to a standstill"), partly from Old French estaler, ultimately from the same origin as Etymology 1, and partly from Middle English stalle ("fixed position, stall").