Wood Stacking Question

I just finished a nice wood shed that, according to my calculations, should hold 10.35 cords. Will post photos soon.

Here's my question. I've been told a cord is a measure of tightly stacked wood. Does that mean as tightly stacked as possible? If not, how much space can be left.

When stacking the wood to dry, is it best to stack with a little more air space even if the result is I don't get my full 10.35 cords under cover?

Thanks for all the responses. Since I'm in a very rainy place, all the wood gets split and placed immediately in the woodshed. Not a lot of room between the rows but it's Douglas fir which I understand dries relatively fast. I've got some wood already well dried but not much (maybe 3/4 of a cord). I'm hoping some of this stuff will be ready late in the season. Maybe I'll stack a couple of cords loosely, single row, in an open spot over 2 X 4s or on palates, just for the summer. We get little rain from July through September (if we're lucky). Then I can cover it with a tarp.

Don't know how much wood it will take to keep our house warm. This will be our first season. We're getting the Blaze King Ashford installed soon. It's a cat stove so the wood needs to be well dried. It's a large home (2650 square feet) but our climate is moderate and it's a modern, efficient home with a fairly open floor plan so I'm hopeful that the Ashford will do the trick. Perhaps we'll need space heaters in some of the upstairs bedrooms, at least until we figure out where to set fans and where to make vents between the floors. Some of this is going to be trial and error. Fortunately, I know the house is efficient because we heated this last season with three or four (depending on time of winter) 1500 watt space heaters. The Ashford on its lowest setting puts out about as much heat as three of these little space heaters.

Thanks for the feedback. The shed is divided into two halves. I figure I'll work through one side and then reload while burning through the other side. That way there will always be nice well-dried wood. Since Doug fir dries fast, and each side will take more than a year (perhaps two years) to use up, I hope this will work well. If not, I'll have to figure out another way, perhaps by subdividing into three sections.

That's a bit scary, particularly since my shed allows me to stack wood 9 feet high. But the way it's loaded, I can't see how it could fall down. The walls of the shed are pretty darn solid and the wood, which runs parallel to the walls, cannot topple end over end or jump out.

That's what I'm thinking. I ask because my wife is pregnant and, in a few years, we'll have a little fella running around the yard, no doubt making havoc. I don't want a pile of wood to fall on him. We'll see how stable it seems when the time comes.

Is that mouse/cat thing for drying and also for measuring a cord? Or is it just the former? I'm beginning to wonder if this cord concept is just an approximation.

That raises another question. Should I split everything or is it best to leave smaller rounds un-split? I would imagine a round would tend to burn more slowly. But it would also dry more slowly. Also, it seems kind of silly to dry a round that's really small.