stovepipe

English

Alternative forms

  • stove-pipe

Etymology

stove + pipe. The firearms sense is due to the trapped cartridge case resembling a stovepipe of the stove sense.

Noun

stovepipe (plural stovepipes)

  1. Sheet-metal tubing used as a chimney for a stove or furnace.
    • 1939 July, “Overseas Railways: Baltic Island Railways”, in Railway Magazine, page 49:
      On the Visby-Västerhejde Railway there is a steam car. [...] The upperworks consist of a short clerestory coach body with end platforms and the engine chimney protruding from the roof like a stovepipe.
    • 1994, Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, New York: Viking, →ISBN, page 146:
      Glass windows replaced the old tiny windows of selenite (crystallized gypsum), and stovepipe replaced adobe chimneys.
  2. A channel for information which is compartmentalized in such a manner that some parties who might be interested in its use or able to make use of it are restricted from accessing it.
  3. (clothing) A stovepipe hat.
    • 2021 December 29, Stephen Roberts, “Stories and facts behind railway plaques: Chippenham (1841)”, in RAIL, number 947, page 57:
      I'm sure the Brunel-designed stone-built structure would have had a hatstand for his trademark stovepipe. I can picture him rocking up there of a morning and lobbing it nonchalantly onto the hatstand.
  4. (firearms) A type of malfunction affecting breechloading firearms, where a spent cartridge casing fails to eject completely, instead becoming stuck in the firearm's ejection port, usually oriented vertically or nearly so.
  5. (military slang, World War I World War II) A trench mortar such as the Stokes mortar.[1]

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

stovepipe (third-person singular simple present stovepipes, present participle stovepiping, simple past and past participle stovepiped)

  1. (transitive, idiomatic) To collect or store (information) in a compartmentalized manner, so that some parties who might be interested in its use or able to make use of it are restricted from accessing it.
  2. (intransitive, firearms) Of a cartridge case, to become wedged vertically in the ejection port of a breechloading firearm, rather than ejecting completely from the weapon.

References

  1. Lighter, Jonathan (1972) “The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917-1919: An Historical Glossary”, in American Speech, volume 47, number 1/2, page 108
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