stack

A stack begins as something oddly upright: a stake planted in the ground, then a haystack built around the idea of things heaped and held together. Old Norse had stakkr for a haystack, and English borrowed it in the Middle Ages, when grain was literally stacked in fields before barns and combines made everything less picturesque. By the 1660s the word had climbed into chimneys—first as a cluster of them standing together, then, by 1825, as the single smokestack on a locomotive or steamship. The same piled-up idea later landed on library shelves and, in 1960, on computer memory, where a stack became a neat mental tower of data. If you want the memory hook, think of a haystack that escaped the farm, moved into a factory, then took a job in programming.