stem vs trunk

stem

noun
  • The penis. 

  • A lesbian, chiefly African-American, exhibiting both stud and femme traits. 

  • A branch of a family. 

  • A component on a bicycle that connects the handlebars to the bicycle fork. 

  • A slender supporting member of an individual part of a plant such as a flower or a leaf; also, by analogy, the shaft of a feather. 

  • A premixed portion of a track for use in audio mastering and remixing. 

  • A person's leg. 

  • The vertical or nearly vertical forward extension of the keel, to which the forward ends of the planks or strakes are attached. 

  • A vertical stroke marking the length of a note in written music. 

  • A narrow part on certain man-made objects, such as a wine glass, a tobacco pipe, a spoon. 

  • A part of an anatomic structure considered without its possible branches or ramifications. 

  • A winder on a clock, watch, or similar mechanism. 

  • The stock of a family; a race or generation of progenitors. 

  • The above-ground stalk (technically axis) of a vascular plant, and certain anatomically similar, below-ground organs such as rhizomes, bulbs, tubers, and corms. 

  • A vertical stroke of a letter. 

  • A crack pipe; or the long, hollow portion of a similar pipe (i.e. meth pipe) resembling a crack pipe. 

  • The main part of an uninflected word to which affixes may be added to form inflections of the word. A stem often has a more fundamental root. Systematic conjugations and declensions derive from their stems. 

  • An advanced or leading position; the lookout. 

verb
  • To direct the stem (of a ship) against; to make headway against. 

  • To ram (clay, etc.) into a blasting hole. 

  • To move the feet apart and point the tips of the skis inward in order to slow down the speed or to facilitate a turn. 

  • To be caused or derived; to originate. 

  • To stop, hinder (for instance, a river or blood). 

  • To descend in a family line. 

  • To remove the stem from. 

trunk

noun
  • The torso. 

  • The luggage storage compartment of a sedan/saloon-style car. 

  • The conspicuously extended, mobile, nose-like organ of an animal such as a sengi, a tapir or especially an elephant. The trunks of various kinds of animals might be adapted to probing and sniffing, as in the sengis, or be partly prehensile, as in the tapir, or be a versatile prehensile organ for manipulation, feeding, drinking and fighting as in the elephant. 

  • The main line or body of anything. 

  • A storage compartment fitted behind the seat of a motorcycle. 

  • A box or chest usually covered with leather, metal, or cloth, or sometimes made of leather, hide, or metal, for holding or transporting clothes or other goods. 

  • A flume or sluice in which ores are separated from the slimes in which they are contained. 

  • A long, large box, pipe, or conductor, made of plank or metal plates, for various uses, as for conveying air to a mine or to a furnace, water to a mill, grain to an elevator, etc. 

  • A chute or conduit, or a watertight shaft connecting two or more decks. 

  • In software projects under source control: the most current source tree, from which the latest unstable builds (so-called "trunk builds") are compiled. 

  • A circuit between telephone switchboards or other switching equipment. 

  • A main line in a river, canal, railroad, or highway system. 

  • The part of a pilaster between the base and capital, corresponding to the shaft of a column. 

  • A large pipe forming the piston rod of a steam engine, of sufficient diameter to allow one end of the connecting rod to be attached to the crank, and the other end to pass within the pipe directly to the piston, thus making the engine more compact. 

  • A large suitcase, chest, or similar receptacle for carrying or storing personal possessions, usually with a hinged, often domed lid, and handles at each end, so that generally it takes two persons to carry a full trunk. 

  • The usually single, more or less upright part of a tree, between the roots and the branches. 

verb
  • To extract (ores) from the slimes in which they are contained, by means of a trunk. 

  • To provide simultaneous network access to multiple clients by sharing a set of circuits, carriers, channels, or frequencies. 

How often have the words stem and trunk occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )