packed in like sardines

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Idioms and Phrases

Extremely crowded, as in I could barely breathe—we were packed in like sardines . This term, alluding to how tightly sardines are packed in cans, has been applied to human crowding since the late 1800s.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

packed packer

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