stocks

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of stock.

   She sold most of her stocks before the market dropped.

   The warehouse keeps healthy stocks of spare parts on hand.

   Note

   An ordinary countable plural, unlike the two frames that exist only as stocks. Many senses of stock are also used uncountably: a store, inventory, livestock. The plural therefore tends to mark separate supplies or kinds, as in stocks of spare parts, of goods, of animals. The spelling is shared with the present-tense verb. In she stocks the shelves, the word is a verb, not a noun.

2. 2
   nounplural

   A wooden frame with holes for the ankles, similar to a pillory, once used to restrain offenders in public for humiliation and punishment.

   Petty offenders were fastened in the stocks for the market crowd to ridicule.

   The magistrate sentenced him to three hours in the stocks for public drunkenness.

   Similarpillory

   Note

   Always plural in form, even when only one wooden frame stands on a village green. It is the stocks, never a stock. It differs from the pillory in what it holds: stocks clamp the ankles of a seated offender, while the pillory holds the head and hands of a standing one. The AA Book of British Villages (1980) still finds a green's old whipping post and stocks, the latter pierced by five holes.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of stock.

   The pharmacy stocks several brands of the same medication.

   He stocks the pond with trout each spring.

   Note

   The regular -s form, used after he, she, it or a singular noun. Other present-tense subjects take the base form stock. It is spelled exactly like the noun plural, so the sentence decides which one you have: in the shop stocks spares, it is a verb. One of its meanings echoes the old punishment frame, since to stock someone once meant to put them in the stocks.

4. 4
   nounplural

   The framework that supports a ship during construction and from which it is finally launched.

   The frigate stood on the stocks while shipwrights fitted her planking.

   Crowds gathered at the yard to watch the vessel leave the stocks at high tide.

   Similarslipway

   Note

   A shipyard word, plural-only like the punishment frame. Its working phrase is on the stocks. A vessel on the stocks is still being built, and once it leaves the stocks it has been launched. The framework slopes toward the water, so the structure that holds the hull during construction also becomes the path it slides down at launch.

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