Purchasing and procurement

The fourteenth entry is o stock de segurança, and the word in the middle is one of ours, borrowed whole and then put on a diet. In English « stock » has an unusually wide reach. It is the goods in the warehouse, which is the sense that travelled; it is also the shares in a company, the liquid a cook boils out of bones, the animals on a farm, the family somebody comes from, and the wooden part of a rifle. Most of those grew out of an old sense of a tree trunk, something standing that other things are fixed to. Portuguese imported the warehouse alone. O stock is what sits on the shelf and nothing else: shares are as ações, the cook’s liquid is o caldo, the farm animals are o gado, and the family one comes from is a estirpe. Two details are worth carrying away. Portugal keeps our spelling, o stock, while Brazil naturalised the word as o estoque; and the plural takes a Portuguese article and a Portuguese ending, os stocks.