See stack talk in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "From stack (noun) + talk (noun). Stack is a clipping of smokestack (“conduit atop a structure (such as a steam locomotive) allowing smoke to flow out”).",
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"ref": "1956, Railway Progress, volume 10, Cleveland, Oh.; Washington, D.C.: Federation for Railway Progress, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 23:",
"text": "[…] Father [Clement C.] Kubesh began making long dashes after trains to insure the correct pitch of sound or the proper placing of his car for the approach of a locomotive. He soon had recorded the \"stack talk\" of every type of locomotive on the Great Northern, Chicago and North Western, Northern Pacific and Union Pacific.",
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"ref": "1956 October, “Railroad Hobby Club”, in Freeman [H.] Hubbard, editor, Railroad Magazine: The Magazine of Adventurous Railroading, volume 67, number 6, Canton, Oh.: Popular Publications, →OCLC, page 80, columns 1–2:",
"text": "[T]he priest [Clement C. Kubesh] makes highly stylized recordings of train sounds. […] To him, every steam engine whistle has a recognizable quality and each puffing stack has its own \"talk.\" […] One October, Father Kubesh spotted a potato warehouse about a quarter-mile from Drayton, N.D., on the Northern Pacific. Plugging in his recorder, he caught No. 13, a passenger train, and recorded the whistle, stack talk, and bell, while the train was rounding a bend and while rushing by the warehouse.",
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"ref": "2022, “Norfolk & Western 611—On Home Rails—Train Blu-Ray”, in A-Trains.com, Greenwood, Ind., archived from the original on 24 Feb 2025:",
"text": "Enjoy the action as this giant 4-8-4 steam locomotive pulls heavy passenger trains over Christianburg Grade and Blue Ridge Grade. […] Highlights include […] Long, heavy trains with great stack talk",
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"glosses": [
"The sound made by the exhaust of a steam locomotive."
],
"id": "en-stack_talk-en-noun-GUFurG8M",
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"(US, rail transport, slang) The sound made by the exhaust of a steam locomotive."
],
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"lang_code": "fi",
"sense": "sound made by the exhaust of a steam locomotive",
"word": "savupiipun ääni"
}
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"sounds": [
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"ipa": "/ˈstæk tɔːk/",
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"Received-Pronunciation"
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"ipa": "/ˈstæk ˌtɔk/",
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{
"ipa": "/-ˌtɑk/",
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"General-American",
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"audio": "LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-stack talk.wav",
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"text": "[…] Father [Clement C.] Kubesh began making long dashes after trains to insure the correct pitch of sound or the proper placing of his car for the approach of a locomotive. He soon had recorded the \"stack talk\" of every type of locomotive on the Great Northern, Chicago and North Western, Northern Pacific and Union Pacific.",
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415
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"text": "[T]he priest [Clement C. Kubesh] makes highly stylized recordings of train sounds. […] To him, every steam engine whistle has a recognizable quality and each puffing stack has its own \"talk.\" […] One October, Father Kubesh spotted a potato warehouse about a quarter-mile from Drayton, N.D., on the Northern Pacific. Plugging in his recorder, he caught No. 13, a passenger train, and recorded the whistle, stack talk, and bell, while the train was rounding a bend and while rushing by the warehouse.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
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[
187,
197
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],
"ref": "2022, “Norfolk & Western 611—On Home Rails—Train Blu-Ray”, in A-Trains.com, Greenwood, Ind., archived from the original on 24 Feb 2025:",
"text": "Enjoy the action as this giant 4-8-4 steam locomotive pulls heavy passenger trains over Christianburg Grade and Blue Ridge Grade. […] Highlights include […] Long, heavy trains with great stack talk",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"The sound made by the exhaust of a steam locomotive."
],
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[
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[
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"(US, rail transport, slang) The sound made by the exhaust of a steam locomotive."
],
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"US",
"slang",
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"rail-transport",
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{
"ipa": "/ˈstæk tɔːk/",
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"Received-Pronunciation"
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},
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"tags": [
"General-American"
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},
{
"ipa": "/-ˌtɑk/",
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"General-American",
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"translations": [
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"lang_code": "fi",
"sense": "sound made by the exhaust of a steam locomotive",
"word": "savupiipun ääni"
}
],
"word": "stack talk"
}
Download raw JSONL data for stack talk meaning in English (4.5kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-08-29 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-08-23 using wiktextract (ffdbfc3 and b9346a0). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.