stall

Definitions

General English

  • noun a place in a market where one person sells his or her

    goods

  • verb to stop unintentionally,

    often

    when

    trying

    to drive off

    without

    accelerating

General Science

  • noun the point at which opposing force overcomes that of the driving part
  • verb to stop operating suddenly or to

    cause

    an engine to do this

Aviation

  • noun a loss of lift caused by the breakdown of

    airflow

    over the wing when the

    angle of attack

    passes a critical point
  • noun a

    situation

    in which an engine or machine stops suddenly because an opposing force overcomes its driving power

Commerce

  • noun a small moveable wooden booth, used for selling goods in a market

Theater

  • see Victorian theater slang.

Travel

  • noun a wooden stand in a market, where a trader displays and sells his or her goods

Origin & History of “stall”

Stall ‘compartment, booth, etc’ (OE) and stall ‘stop’ (15th c.) are

distinct

words, but

they

have

a common

ancestor

, in prehistoric Germanic *stal-, *stel- ‘position’ (source of

English

still).

this

in turn was formed

from

the base *sta- ‘stand’,

which

also

produced English stand. From *stal- was derived the

noun

*stallaz ‘standing-place (for an

animal

)’, which has given German, Swedish, and English stall, Dutch stal, and Danish stald. A stallion (14th c.) is etymologically a horse kept in a ‘stall’ for breeding purposes. And stable represents a parallel Latin formation to the Germanic stall (it has

become

specialized to a ‘building for horses’, whereas stall developed to ‘standing-place for a

single

animal’). The

same

Germanic base produced Frankish *stal ‘position’, which formed the basis of Old French estaler ‘halt’, source of the English

verb

stall, and also of English stale and stalemate.
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