A stockpile is a large amount of something that you save for later. If you're worried about running out of your favorite flavor of bubble gum, you might decide to keep a stockpile of it.
- Pronunciation: /'stɑkpaɪl/
- English description: a storage pile accumulated for future use
- Synonyms: reserve
- Chinese Translation: 储备物资(chu3 bei4 wu4 zi1)
- Spanish Translation: la reservas
- ORIGIN: If you hear the word stockpile on the news, it's probably referring to weapons which are accumulated and saved by a country that might need to use them some day in the future. You can use stockpile to describe the actual cache of weapons and also as a verb, to describe the act of storing them. The word was originally a mining term that literally described a pile of ore. During World War II, stockpile became a more general term.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE:
- An effort on the part of businesses to align their stockpiles with weaker sales dampened economic activity in the summer.
- The more waste and scrap Iran generated, the more work would be needed later to shrink its stockpile.
*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com