means A tall vertical pipe or chimney that carries away the smoke and exhaust from a factory, ship, or locomotive.

from A plain compound of "smoke" and "stack," both old Germanic-rooted English words — "smoke" tracing back to Old English "smoca," and "stack" arriving via Old Norse "stakkr," originally a heap of hay. The pairing rose with industry: as factories and steamships sprouted towering chimneys in the 19th century, English needed a word for the smoke-belching stack, and simply bolted the two together. The same logic gave America its "smokestack industries."