stock
Pluralstocks
Pluralstocks
Formsstocks, stocking, stocked
- 1The shares of a company, or a portion of them held as an investment; also, the value of those shares as traded on the market.
Investors who hold stock in the firm receive dividends each quarter.
He moved his savings into stock rather than leaving it in a bank.
UsageYou buy stock in a company, or buy stocks. In British English, shares is more usual for holdings in one company.
- 2A supply of goods or other things kept on hand, ready for sale or for use when needed.
The warehouse holds enough stock to cover three months of orders.
Retailers clear out leftover stock at the end of each season.
UsageIn stock means available and out of stock means none left. For goods in general, no a: more stock.
Similarinventory, supply, stockpile, reserve, store
Note
In operations and retail, it means goods on the shelf, counted and managed so that carrying costs stay low without the risk of running short.
- 3To supply or fill something with the materials or goods it needs.
Volunteers stock the food bank with donated goods each week.
The state plans to stock the lake with trout this spring.
UsageUsually stock a place with something: stock the lake with trout. A well-stocked shop has plenty.
Similarsupply, fill, provision, equip, replenish
Note
Its objects are places, and what counts as filling them depends on the place. A warehouse is stocked with goods, and a farm with cattle and tools. To stock land is to give it a permanent growth, especially of grass.
- 4A flavored liquid made by simmering meat, bones, or vegetables, used as a base for soups and stews.
The chef simmered the bones overnight to make a rich stock.
A good vegetable stock forms the base of this risotto.
UsageNamed by what goes into it: chicken stock, beef stock, vegetable stock.
Note
The kitchen sense belongs with stock as raw material: not a dish in itself but the base other dishes are built on. It is named by what goes into it, as in beef stock or vegetable stock, and is often made from scraps that would otherwise go unused. Soup and stew are what it becomes.
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Culinary stock belongs with the sense of material prepared for use in making something else. gutenberg.org
- Early stocks were broths produced by poaching meat and fish; bones were not their defining original ingredient. workforce.libretexts.org
- Stock can make use of scraps that might otherwise be discarded. gutenberg.org
- Stock is used as a base for soups and stews. en.wikipedia.org
- 5To keep goods on hand and available for sale.
Local pharmacies stock a wide range of cold remedies.
The bookstore began to stock more translated fiction.
UsageThe object is the goods: the shop stocks batteries. Compare stock a shop with goods, where the place is the object.
- 6Standard and regularly made or kept available, as produced by the maker, rather than custom-made, specially ordered, or modified.
Stock components ship immediately, while bespoke parts take weeks.
The dealer offered a stock color rather than a special order.
UsageUsually before a noun: stock sizes, a stock model, stock parts.
Similarstandard, regular, off-the-shelf
- 7Farm or ranch animals such as cattle, sheep, and pigs, kept for use or sale.
Drought forced ranchers to sell stock they could no longer feed.
The family raises both crops and stock on the same land.
UsageLivestock is the more common word. With stock alone, there is usually no plural: the farmer moved his stock.
Similarlivestock
- 8Ordinary and unoriginal; of a familiar, predictable type rather than something freshly created.
Her speech relied on stock phrases instead of fresh ideas.
The villain was a stock figure, evil for no clear reason.
UsageCommon before words for speech and stories: stock phrase, stock answer, stock character.
Similarhackneyed, standard, conventional, stereotyped, formulaic
Oppositeoriginal, fresh, novel, unconventional
Note
The adjective turns ordinariness into a mild criticism: a stock answer is the one handed to everyone, ready-made rather than thought through.
- 9The engines, cars, and other vehicles that operate on a railroad.
The company invested heavily in modern stock to speed up freight deliveries.
Aging passenger stock was gradually pulled from service across the network.
UsageOften called rolling stock.
- 10The part of a rifle or shotgun, often made of wood, that rests against the shooter's shoulder.
She rested the stock against her shoulder and steadied her aim.
A well-fitted stock reduces the felt recoil of a powerful rifle.
Similarbutt
Note
The gunsmith's sense belongs to stock as handle: the part the working mechanism is fitted to, and the part the shooter holds. Tom Turpin's Modern Custom Guns shows how much craft gathers there: "Stock work immediately attracts attention," with fancy checkering drawing admiration. Stock work is the trade's phrase for shaping and finishing this part.
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- Tom Turpin wrote Modern Custom Guns. gundigest.com
- The quoted sentence and the paraphrase about admiration for fancy checkering match the passage attributed to Turpin's book. en.wiktionary.org
- 11The population of a wild animal, especially fish, available to be caught for economic use.
Scientists warned that the herring stock could collapse without strict quotas.
Cod stock in the North Atlantic fell sharply during the late twentieth century.
UsageOften plural, or in fish stocks: cod stocks recover or collapse.
Similarpopulation
Note
The word frames wild animals as a store to be managed. That is why husbandry, a farming word, sits naturally beside it, much as it does beside farm animals.
- 12
- 13A flowering plant of the genus Matthiola, a small group of species that belongs to the mustard family.
The florist filled the vase with purple stock and a few white roses.
Gardeners often sow stocks in early spring so the beds are in flower by summer.
Less common meanings
- 14A measure of how highly a person or institution is regarded by others.
The mayor's stock rose sharply following the successful recovery effort.
After the failed product launch, the CEO's stock plummeted within the company.
UsageUsually with rising or falling: someone's stock rose or fell, his stock is high.
Similarreputation
Note
The market's language carried over to people: a reputation that rises and falls the way a share price does. In 2022, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman write of a governor "with his stock rising fast in the party."
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- The reputation sense is a figurative extension of financial stock. en.wiktionary.org
- Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman used the quoted words in 2022 about a governor. en.wiktionary.org
- The quoted wording is accurate. en.wiktionary.org
- 15A person's family line or ancestry; the people one is descended from.
He came from sturdy peasant stock, generations of laborers and farmers.
She was of noble stock, descended from an old aristocratic family.
UsageUsually from or of with a describing word: from farming stock, of noble stock.
Similardescent, ancestry, lineage, extraction, blood
Note
Family history borrows the image of the tree trunk: your stock is the line you grew from. Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great shows the older moral weight of the idea, calling a rebellious brother a "shame vnto thy stocke."
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- The ancestry sense extends the image of a tree trunk or stock. en.wiktionary.org
- Christopher Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine the Great. en.wikipedia.org
- The quotation occurs in the play as Mycetes' condemnation of his rebellious brother Cosroe. emed.folger.edu
- 16Theater performed by a resident company that stages a rotating series of plays during a season, especially in summer.
Many famous actors got their start in stock, playing a new part each week.
The director cut her teeth in stock before moving to film.
UsageOften summer stock; actors act or work in stock.
- 17
- 18A tree's trunk together with its principal woody limbs; by extension, the base out of which something grows or branches.
The vine climbed upward from a sturdy stock rooted deep in the soil.
New shoots sprang up from the old stock after the tree was cut back.
Note
The sense the whole word grows from: Old English stocc, from a Germanic word meaning "tree-trunk." Most later meanings look either to the trunk as a tree's origin and support, or to a piece of wood taken from it. The King James Bible of 1611 uses it for a stump that seems dead yet buds again: "the stocke thereof die in the ground."
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Stock descends from Old English stocc and ultimately from a Germanic word meaning tree-trunk. en.wiktionary.org
- Most subsequent meanings developed from the trunk as origin or support, or from pieces of wood. en.wiktionary.org
- The King James Bible was first published in 1611. archive.org
- Job 14:8–9 uses the quoted wording about a stock that dies but buds again. kingjamesbibleonline.org
- 19The rooted plant onto which a scion (a shoot from another plant) is grafted.
Nurseries often choose a disease-resistant stock for grafting delicate varieties.
The apple cultivar was grafted onto a dwarfing stock to limit its height.
Similarrootstock
Note
Grafting needs two parts, and this is the rooted one; the scion is the shoot set into it. Stock and scion form a fixed pair in horticulture. Francis Bacon states the balance between them in 1627: "The cion overruleth the stock quite." In his view, the grafted shoot rather than the rooted plant decides the character of what grows.
- 20
- 21A necktie or cravat, especially a wide band popular in the eighteenth century and now worn as part of formal riding attire.
Her show outfit was incomplete without a snowy stock at the throat.
The gentleman's portrait showed an elaborately folded silk stock.
Note
Novelists reach for this neckwear when they want to place a man in an earlier age. W. Somerset Maugham, in Of Human Bondage (1915), dresses a man in a white stock and says he "looked like a respectable farmer of the middle of the nineteenth century." Lawrence Durrell's Livia (1978) still gives one to a grey, aquiline gentleman. Today it survives mainly in formal riding dress.
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 5 facts
- W. Somerset Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage, first published in 1915. en.wikipedia.org
- The man described in Maugham's novel wears a white stock. gutenberg.org
- The quoted comparison is exact and occurs in the narration describing Doctor South. gutenberg.org
- Lawrence Durrell wrote Livia, first published in 1978. openlibrary.org
- Livia describes a man wearing a stock whose face is aquiline and grey. en.wiktionary.org
- 22To confine a person in the stocks (a wooden frame clamping the ankles or wrists) as a public punishment.
- 23A grouping of related languages larger than a language family; a superfamily or macrofamily.
- 24Usually in the plural, stocks: the frame or timbers supporting a ship's hull while it is under construction, as in on the stocks.
- 25A component of a machine that supports objects or holds them in position.
- 26A bar, stick, or rod.
- 27Soap that has not yet been colored or scented.
- 28On a lathe or drill, the fixed headstock that holds the turning spindle.
- 29On a lathe, the sliding tailstock that supports the far end of the work.
- 30One of the poles a skier holds for balance and pushing off.
- 31The crossbar of an anchor, set at a right angle to its flukes.
- 32The upright shaft fixed to a vessel's rudder that turns it when the wheel or tiller moves.
- 33A large upright, pipe-shaped body of ore within the surrounding rock.
- 34A black bib or panel that clergy wear beneath their collar to cover the shirt front.
- 35Somewhere for a baby to sleep, such as a cot or rocking cradle.
- 36A block of wood made by fairies to look like a baby and left in place of a stolen human child.
- 37A stocking or other garment covering the leg.
- 38A wooden block, stump, post or pillar, or anything else solid and firmly fixed.
- 39A dull, senseless person, as unfeeling as a block of wood.
Let's be no stoics, nor no stocks.
c. 1590, William Shakespeare, “The Taming of the Shrew” - 40The larger of the two halves of a notched wooden tally, given by the old English Exchequer to a lender to the Crown as proof of the debt.
- 41Good-quality bricks in red or gray, laid on the outer faces of buildings.
- 42In Ernst Haeckel's theory of organic form, a group of linked organisms living as one unit, for example a tree or a chain of salps.
- 43The heavy hammer in a fulling mill that pounds the cloth.
- 44To leave cows unmilked for a day or more before selling them, so their udders look full.
- 45To give an anchor its crossbar, or to secure that bar tightly.
- 46To set up the order of cards in a deck secretly so as to cheat.
- 47A stab or thrust with the point of a rapier.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English "stok," from Old English "stocc," going back to Proto-Germanic "*stukkaz" ("tree-trunk"). Most modern senses relate either to the trunk a tree grows from (figuratively an origin or foundation) or to a piece of wood, stick, or rod. The "supply" and "raw material" senses probably arose from a conflation with "steck" ("an item of goods, merchandise") or from split tally sticks used to record paid taxes, debts, or exchanges. It is a doublet of "chock."
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Stock derives through Middle English stok from Old English stocc and Proto-Germanic *stukkaz. en.wiktionary.org
- Most senses follow the trunk/foundation or wooden-piece lines. en.wiktionary.org
- Conflation with steck and split tallies are proposed origins of the supply and raw-material senses. en.wiktionary.org
- Stock and chock are doublets. en.wiktionary.org