How to spell stock

hear itstock/stɑk/nounSilent and tricky

What it means: A supply of something gathered and kept for use.

In a sentence: We keep a stock of apples in the pantry.

The part people get wrong

Often misspelled as stalk or stoc.

Same family: stocks, stocked, stocking, gunstock, buttstock. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: Stock comes from Old English *stocc*, meaning a tree trunk or log, which later came to mean a solid piece of wood—this is why the wooden part of a gun is called the stock. The same root also gave us words like ‘stocking’ and ‘livestock,’ all connected to ideas of something solid, stored, or kept.

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