smokestack

English

Smokestacks.

Etymology

From smoke +‎ stack.

Pronunciation

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Noun

smokestack (plural smokestacks)

1. A conduit or group of conduits atop a structure allowing smoke to flow out, as on a steam locomotive, ship, factory, or power plant using fossil fuels.
   • 1942 February, “Notes and News: An Historic American Locomotive”, in Railway Magazine, page 56:

     With its long tapered cowcatcher, massive headlamp and enormous diamond smokestack behind, wagon-top boiler, high running-plate above the driving-wheels reached from a front door in the square side-window cab, cylinders with slide valves mounted on top, and double bogie tender, General in its present form is typical of much earlier American locomotive practice.

   • 2012, Tom Miller, “The Construction Orgy: Paving the Fields”, in China's Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History‎^[1], Zed Books, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 137‎^[2]:

     One of those areas can be found at the city’s northern edge, where the towering smokestacks of Wuhan Iron and Steel loom behind bent-backed farmers tending vegetable patches. Today Qingshan district is a patchwork of tiny fields, polluted streams and roadside markets selling building materials. But the city government is in the process of transforming this no-man’s-land into a sparkling new suburb. Between the steelworks and the mighty Yangtze River, demolished buildings and hoardings advertise a new logistics centre. Down the road, a giant railway station (Wuhan’s third) and a 6-kilometre bridge (the city’s fifth to cross the Yangtze) were completed in 2010.

Derived terms

• smokestack industry

Translations

a conduit or group of conduits atop a structure allowing smoke to flow out — see chimney

See also

• chimney
• flue