stock

Definitions

General English

  • noun a supply of

    something

    kept to use

    when

    needed
  • verb to keep

    goods

    for

    sale

    in a shop or warehouse

General Science

  • verb to provide a supply of something for future use

Accounting

  • noun the available supply of

    raw materials

  • noun investments in a

    company

    , represented by shares or fixed interest securities

Agriculture

  • noun animals or plants that are derived from a common ancestor
  • noun a plant with roots onto which a piece of another plant, the scion, is grafted.
  • verb to

    introduce

    livestock

    into an

    area

    or into a farm

Commerce

  • verb to hold goods for sale in a

    warehouse

    or store

Construction

  • material

    or devices readily available from suppliers.
  • The body or handle of a tool.
  • A frame to hold a die when cutting external threads on a pipe.
  • The total value of the equity in a

    corporation

    .

Economics

  • adjective kept for sale all the time
  • noun the quantity of

    goods

    for sale or kept available for use.
  • noun the total number of shares issued by a company
  • noun a share of capital held by an individual investor

Food

  • water flavoured with

    extracts

    from herbs, spices, vegetables and/or

    bones

    by long simmering

Health Economics

  • (written as Stock)
    The quantity of an entity (like beds, or nurses, or health, or money) that exists at a point in time.

Information & Library Science

  • noun the total quantity of items available for use or sale

Media Studies

Military

  • noun a quantity of

    supplies

    held

    ready

    for use

Travel

  • noun the quantity of goods or raw materials kept by a

    business

  • noun liquid made from boiling bones, etc., in water, used as a base for soups and sauces

Origin & History of “stock”

The word stock originally denoted a ‘tree-trunk’. It came

from

a prehistoric Germanic *stukkaz,

which

also

produced German stock ‘stick’ and Swedish stock ‘log’. The lineal

semantic

descent to the stocks (14th c.), a punishment device made from

large

pieces of wood, is clear

enough

, but how stock came to be used for a ‘supply, store’ (a sense

first

recorded in the 15th century) is

more

of a

mystery

. It may be

that

a tradesman’s supply of goods was

thought

of metaphorically as the trunk of a tree, from which profits grew

like

branches; and another possibility is that the usage was inspired by an unrecorded application of stock to a wooden storage

chest

or

money

box. Stock ‘broth’ was so named (in the 18th century, apparently)

because

one keeps a ‘stock’ of it on hand in the stockpot, for use at need. The original notion of a

stout

piece of wood is preserved in the derivative stocky (14th c.), and also in stock-still (15th c.) – literally ‘as still as a log’.
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