What Does Noun Stacks Mean?

The noun stacks is a grammatical term that is often used in technical writing. A noun stack refers to that grammatical error wherein a cluster of nouns is wedged together in a phrase. One should avoid noun stacks in a sentence as too many nouns together may confuse the reader. An example of a noun stack as following, "micro bacteria population diversity has increased in the last three years." To avoid the problem of the noun stack, the sentence can be rephrased as follows, "the diversity of micro bacteria has increased in the last three years".

In order to unstack a noun stack, one should take some of the nouns which are wedged together, and use them in their prepositional forms, or verb phrases or even in the form of adjectives.