📦 Counting goods 🔍 Reviewing situation

stocktaking

5.6

Reviewing a situation or resources to judge progress and plan ahead

noun
/ˈstɑkˌteɪkɪŋ/

: evaluación

But I think we should pause, and pause now, to do a little stocktaking, to look into our own hearts and lives and see what we find there.

Examples

Another period of stocktaking for free speech theory appears to be dawning, and some recent commentators have proposed a retrenchment from the long twentieth-century progression of increasingly speech-protective interpretations of the First Amendment.

Academic text (1996)
Before making future plans, the team conducted a thorough stocktaking of their current resources.
When my bookshop is quiet, I do a stocktaking job.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
At the end of each quarter, the manager insists on stocktaking to evaluate the project's progress.
After facing several challenges, the organization decided it was time for a stocktaking of its strategies and goals.

Synonyms

stock-taking

vsstocktaking

5.2

A careful review of a situation to decide what to change

is the same meaning but written without a hyphen in modern usage

How Thorough

audit

69 4.4

stocktaking

5.6

check

720 1.0

to scan

127 2.7

Surface Forms

stocktaking singular

stocktakings plural

Morphology

stocktaking = stock + take (semi-transparent) = stock + take + ing

Structurally formed from 'stock' + 'take' with '-ing'; the morphological formation is regular even though the sense is extended.

Etymology

Stocktaking is also used in a more general way because it grew from the idea of counting supplies, so to 'take stock' came to mean 'review' or 'assess' a situation. A helpful way to remember this is to imagine checking what you have and then deciding what to do next, which is what a stocktaking does when people review progress or resources.