Stocks
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Stocks. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a contrivance for the confinement of vagrants, drunkards, and other petty offenders. It consisted of two or more horizontal timbers resting in a frame. The cracks were enlarged at intervals into holes suitable to confine the ankles or wrists. In use, the upper timber was raised, the offender was caused to assume a sitting position, his legs or arms, and sometimes both, were placed in these holes and the timber was fastened down in place. The stocks were common in Europe and even in England until a late date. Imprisonment in the stocks was a usual form of punishment in New England . Cases of placing a man in the stocks for failing to attend church were not uncommon. The antiquarians of Salem, Boston, and other New England towns still point out the place where the stocks used to stand. Imprisonment in this manner was degrading rather than painful. See Pillory
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an apparatus formerly used for the punishment of petty offenders, such as vagrants, trespassers, and the like. It consisted of a frame of timber, with holes, in which the ankles, and some times the ankles and wrists, sts, of the of fenders were confined. In farriery, etc., a frame in which refractory animals are held for shoeing or veterinary purposes. In shipbuilding, a frame of blocks and shores on which a vessel is built. In finance, a stock is a fund employed in the carrying on of some business or enterprise, and divided into shares held by individuals who collectively form a corporation. Also a fund in England consisting of a capital debt due by the government to individual holders, who receive a fixed rate of interest on their shares; money funded in government securities; s; as, the 3 per cent. stocks.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's still wrote in 1910 that the stocks had been common "even in England until a late date," and that antiquarians in Salem and Boston could point out where they once stood — which is now the whole of their existence. No jurisdiction in Britain or the United States has used the stocks as a punishment for well over a century; the surviving frames on village greens in England are protected heritage objects, sometimes listed monuments, photographed by tourists rather than filled with drunkards. The other half of Collier's 1921 entry has quietly won the word: "stock" now means a share in a company to almost every English speaker, and the British sense of a funded government debt paying "3 per cent." has faded into the older term consols and into history.
Written for this edition, 2026.