packing

American  

[pak-ing] / ˈpæk ɪŋ /

noun

• packings
  plural

1. the act or work of a person or thing that packs.

2. the preparation and packaging of foodstuffs, especially to be sold at wholesale.

3. the way in which something is packed.

4. an act or instance of transporting supplies, goods, etc., on the backs of horses, mules, or persons.

5. material used to cushion or protect goods packed in a container.

6. material, often in the form of a grease-impregnated fibrous ring, compressed inside a stuffing box or the like to prevent leakage around the moving shaft of an engine, pump, or valve.

7. Printing. rubber, paper, or other material fastened to the tympan or cylinder of a press to provide pressure to produce a printed impression.

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packing British  

/ ˈpækɪŋ /

noun

1. 1. material used to cushion packed goods

   2. ( as modifier )

      a packing needle

2. the packaging of foodstuffs

3. med

   1. the application of a medical pack

   2. gauze or other absorbent material for packing a wound

4. printing sheets of material, esp paper, used to cover the platen or impression cylinder of a letterpress machine

5. any substance or material used to make watertight or gastight joints, esp in a stuffing box

6. engineering pieces of material of various thicknesses used to adjust the position of a component or machine before it is secured in its correct position or alignment

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Usage

What is packing? Packing is the act of grouping items into a container, especially for storing or moving the items. Packing can also describe the container or wrapping itself used to pack items. Example: The packing on this Christmas gift is too hard to get off!

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• underpacking
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• packings
  plural

Etymology

Origin of packing

1350–1400; Middle English pakking (gerund). See pack ¹, -ing ¹

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

packing packings

As a young woman in the 1920s, she disguised herself as a man and worked on a local archaeological dig at the Roman Villa Casale until she was ratted out and sent packing.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026

American inspectors in Michoacán, who monitor plantations and packing plants to ensure the fruit is pest-free, occasionally have found themselves in the cross-hairs.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026

Lee then focused on graduating early, packing his remaining coursework into two dense semesters — taking seven classes during one of them.

From MarketWatch ● Aug. 4, 2026

The Ravenswood City Elementary School District is now preparing for an enrollment surge, renovating a campus to avoid packing students into portable trailers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 1, 2026

When they returned to the camp, everyone was busy packing.

From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer

In 1773 physicist and mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange found that the arrangement along a triangular lattice is optimal—so long as you only consider ordered packings.

From Scientific American ● Jun. 6, 2023

High-dimensional sphere packings are related to the error-correcting techniques used to fix garbles in the transmission of information.

From New York Times ● Jul. 5, 2022

In geometry, he made key discoveries in the study of symmetries, sphere packings, lattices, polyhedra and tilings, including properties of quasi-periodic tilings as developed by Roger Penrose.

From Nature ● May 22, 2020

Hexagonal arrangements of cells are like closest geometrical packings of disks.

From Scientific American ● Oct. 25, 2017

Slowly it would be levered up, and packings or wedges of wood or stone inserted.

From Stonehenge Today and Yesterday by Heywood Sumner

Related Words

• Styrofoam