a. [f. STOCK sb. + -ISH.]
1. Resembling a stock or block of wood; esp. of a person, excessively dull, stupid or ‘wooden.’
1596. Shaks., Merch. V., V. i. 81. Naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage, But musicke for time doth change his nature.
1612. T. Taylor, Comm. Titus, i. 7. A stockish senselessnesse, or a sufferance of any evill, without any great sense of it.
1641. Ld. Brooke, Eng. Episc., I. ix. 53. The issue will be slavish, grosse superstition, and stockish Idolatry.
1816. Colman, Br. Grins, Fire! xvii. Touched by vivific flame, the stockish dirt Fermented, and became no more inert.
1842. Emerson, Lect., Transcendentalist, Wks. (Bohn), II. 285. These persons are not by nature melancholy,… they are not stockish or brute.
1842. J. Foster, Life & Corr. (1846), II. 347. The stockish stupidity of those Chartists.
1881. Stevenson, Virg. Puerisque, Apol. Idlers, 124. Many … come out of the study with an … owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life.
2. Short and thick-set, stocky. rare–1.
1913. N. Munro, New Road, xviii. A stockish little man dressed in the Highland habit.
Hence Stockishly adv., Stockishness.
1837. Browning, Strafford, III. iii. O stockishness! Wear such a ruff, and never call to mind St. John’s head in a charger? Ibid. (1846), Soul’s Trag., II. Poems (1905), 358/1. I understand only the dull mule’s way of standing stockishly.
1914. H. Newbolt, Aladore, xxvi. Then he stood before her stockishly, like a thing of wood.
