pile-up

See also: pile up and pileup

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From the verb phrase pile up.

Noun

pile-up (plural pile-ups)

  1. (colloquial) A pile, a group of people or things which have piled up on one another, especially
    1. A pile of crashed vehicles due to a traffic accident.
      Traffic was backed up for miles due to a twelve-car pile-up on the freeway earlier today.
    2. (American football) A pile of tackling players.
  2. An accumulation that occurs over time, especially one which is not welcome.
    • 2001, Gavriel Salvendy, Handbook of Industrial Engineering: Technology and Operations Management, →ISBN:
      If the supervisor deals with daily workload in an orderly way and does not put pressure on the employee about a pile-up of work, then the employee's perception of pressure will be reduced and the employee will not suffer from work pressure stress.
    • 2002, Carl-Mikael Zetterling, Process Technology for Silicon Carbide Devices, →ISBN, page 107:
      Evidently, the annealing in NO ambient results in a pile-up of nitrogen at the oxide/SiC interface and this results in a reduction of interface states near the conduction band edge of 4H-SiC [16,30,31].
    • 2004, G. Molnar, Handbook of Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis: With Neutron Beams, →ISBN:
      Cusp-like trapezoidal shaping functions have been shown to produce the best signal-to-noise ratio and still maintain short duration to avoid pile-up of events.
    • 2014, Hamilton I Mc Cubbin, ‎Marvin B Sussman, Social Stress and the Family, →ISBN:
      Because family crises evolve and are resolved over a period of time, families seldom are dealing with a single stressor, but rather, our longitudinal data suggest they experience a pile-up of stressors and strains (i.e., demands), particularly in the aftermath of a major stressor, such as a death, a major role change for one member, or a natural disaster.

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