Jove with a Nod, comply'd with her Deſire; / Around the Body flam'd the Funeral Fire; / ThePile decreas'd that lately ſeem'd ſo high, / And Sheets of Smoak roll'd upward to the Sky: [...]
Thepile is of a gloomy and massive, rather than of an elegant, style of Gothic architecture;[…]
1697,Virgil, “(please specify the book number)”, inJohn Dryden, transl.,The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis.[…], London:[…]Jacob Tonson,[…],→OCLC:
It was dark when the four-wheeled cab wherein he had brought Avice from the station stood at the entrance to thepile of flats of which Pierston occupied one floor[…]
2021 September 22, Stephen Roberts, “The writings on the wall...”, inRAIL, number940, page75:
He [Winston Churchill] was born at Blenheim Palace, that Oxfordshirepile built for his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, who also knew a thing or two about warfare.
Abundle of pieces ofwrought iron to be worked over into bars or other shapes by rolling or hammering at a welding heat; afagot.
A vertical series of alternate disks of two dissimilar metals (especially copper and zinc),laid up with disks of cloth or papermoistened with acid water between them, for producing a current of electricity; a voltaic pile, or galvanic pile.
1893, Benjamin Park,The Voltaic Cell: Its Construction and Its Capacity, page14:
The word "pile" is used specifically to mean the column of superposed electrodes, such as that ofVolta orZamboni.
(architecture, civil engineering) Abeam,pole, orpillar, driven completely into the ground, usually as one of a group that constitutes afoundation.
2011 December 29, Keith Jackson, “SPL: Celtic 1 Rangers 0”, inDaily Record[2]:
And the moment it thumped into the net, Celtic’s march back to the top of the SPLpile also seemed unstoppable.
2012 September 20, Shaun Edwards, “Bent double and lungs burning – how Harlequins train for trophies”, inThe Guardian (online)[3]:
Watch Harlequins train and you get some idea of why they are back on top of thepile going into Saturday's rerun of last season's grand final against Leicester.
wrought iron to be worked over into bars or other shapes—seefagot
vertical series of alternate disks of two dissimilar metals, laid up with disks of cloth or paper moistened with acid water between them, for producing a current of electricity; voltaic pile or galvanic pile
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions atWiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers.Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster.
But as the second half wore on, Sunderlandpiled forward at every opportunity and their relentless pressure looked certain to be rewarded in the closing stages.
A largestake, or piece of pointedtimber, steel etc., driven into the earth or sea-bed for the support of a building, apier, or othersuperstructure, or to form acofferdam, etc.
All this time I worked very hard [...] and it is scarce credible what inexpressible labour everything was done with, especially the bringingpiles out of the woods and driving them into the ground; for I made them much bigger than I needed to have done.
FromFrenchpile(“battery”), with the pronunciation adapted to the existing English wordpile.Doublet ofEtymology 1, which may have influenced the sense development by emphasizing the stack (“pile”) out of which early batteries were made.(Canthis(+) etymology besourced?)
Inherited fromOld French, fromLatinpīla (throughItalianpila for the “battery” sense). The “tail of a coin” sense is probably derived from previous senses, but it's not known for sure.
^Matasović, Ranko,Dubravka Ivšić Majić,Tijmen Pronk (2021), “pȉle”, inMatasović, Ranko, editor,Etimološki rječnik hrvatskoga jezika [Etymological dictionary of the Croatian language] (in Serbo-Croatian), volumeII: O – Ž, Zagreb: Institut za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje, page123
Jacob Poole (d. 1827) (before 1828), William Barnes, editor,A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, published1867,page88
