In a Word: Taking Stock of Your Stockings

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

In homes around the world, stockings are being hung by the chimney (or shelf or flat-screen TV) with care in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon will be there. But why is this type of foot covering — or in this case, oversized, foot-shaped receptacle — called a stocking?

It starts with stock (Middle English stok, Old English stocc). This word essentially indicated types of thick, straight wooden things: first a tree trunk, but also a stump, a log, or a wooden post. From this simple beginning grew a number of word senses that you might not realize are related:

• If you’ve ever seen someone stand “stock-still,” they are metaphorically as immoveable as a stump or as still as a log.
• Genealogically speaking, do you come from good stock? That type of stock is a reference to your family tree.
• Because it was made from wood, the butt end of a musket is called its stock. The whole musket — and metaphorically the whole of anything — comprises “lock, stock, and barrel.”
• Wood was a main element in constructing a form of public punishment. Perhaps you’ve heard of the stocks, a wooden contraption that binds the feet or the feet and hands. (Not to be confused with the pillory, which binds the head and hands but leaves the feet free.)
• Stock as a trader’s inventory appeared in the early 1400s, but just how it links to the “tree” sense is a bit of a mystery. It might be the sense of a shop-owner’s stock being the central part of a metaphorical tree from which profits grow, or it might relate to a now obsolete sense of stock as a wooden box or chest in which a merchant’s items or money were stored.
• Since the early 1600s, a person built like a tree or a stump — compact, sturdy, and solid — has been called
• More and more, stock came to indicate a raw or fundamental material from which other things were made. For instance, starting in the mid-1700s, newspapers and pamphlets were printed on paper stock, and by the 1870s, the fundamental ingredient for soup was being called stock — you might have a can of (wood-free) chicken stock in your cupboard right now.

But back to Christmas: The stockings that are worn on the legs come from one of two places — either from the comparison of one’s legs to logs or stumps (consider that a leg is also a limb, a word that also denotes parts of tree), or from the old-timey stocks used for punishment. Those stocks wrapped around an offender’s ankles, as stockings do.

We’ve been hanging Christmas stockings for more than two centuries, but why?

According to legend, a poor father was worried about the fates of his three young daughters. With no money for a dowry, he fretted that they would be unmarriageable and would therefore be confined to a life of lonely destitution. St. Nicholas happened to overhear the man’s worrisome moaning and took pity on him. Under cover of darkness, he took either three gold coins or balls of gold (symbolically replaced by oranges in more modern times) and either tossed them down the man’s chimney or lowered himself bodily down the chimney. The gold, either intentionally or by some chance or miracle, ended up in some socks — er, stockings — that the three daughters had washed and hung by the fire to dry.

It’s a far-fetched and fantastical story, yes. But at Christmastime, that’s exactly the type of story we love to revel in.