Word.ws English Dictionary

stovepipe

stovepipe noun: sheet-metal tubing used as a chimney for a stove or furnace.

Noun

stovepipe (plural stovepipes)

  1. Sheet-metal tubing used as a chimney for a stove or furnace.
    • 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.1939 July, “Overseas Railways: Baltic Island Railways”, in Railway Magazine, page 49
    • Glass windows replaced the old tiny windows of selenite (crystallized gypsum), and stovepipe replaced adobe chimneys.1994, Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, New York: Viking, →ISBN, page 146
  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. A stovepipe hat.
    • 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.2021 December 29, Stephen Roberts, “Stories and facts behind railway plaques: Chippenham (1841)”, in RAIL, number 947, page 57
  4. 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. (slang) A trench mortar such as the Stokes mortar.

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic, transitive) 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) Of a cartridge case, to become wedged vertically in the ejection port of a breechloading firearm, rather than ejecting completely from the weapon.
  3. To improperly share classified information or share such information without sufficient context.

Forms of stovepipe

Noun
pluralstovepipes
alternative formstove-pipe
Verb
third-person singular presentstovepipes
present participlestovepiping
past participlestovepiped
paststovepiped

Origin of stovepipe

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

Words formed from stovepipe

Phrases with stovepipe

Questions about stovepipe

What does stovepipe mean?
Stovepipe means sheet-metal tubing used as a chimney for a stove or furnace.
What part of speech is stovepipe?
Stovepipe can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of stovepipe?
The plural of stovepipe is stovepipes.

Words near stovepipe in the dictionary

  1. stovemaker
  2. stovemakers
  3. stovemaking
  4. stoven
  5. stoven in
  6. stovepipe
  7. stovepipe hat
  8. stovepipe hats
  9. stovepipe tornado
  10. stovepipe tornados
  11. stovepipe trousers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stovepipe (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-stovepipe.wav.

Cite this entry: “stovepipe.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stovepipe. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.