packing

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The act or process of one that packs.
2. n. The processing and packaging of manufactured products, especially food products.
3. n. A material used to prevent leakage or seepage, as around a pipe joint.
4. n. The insertion of gauze or other material into a body cavity or wound for therapeutic purposes.
5. n. The material so used; a pack.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. Any material used for filling an empty space, closing a joint, and the like; stuffing, as the filling of a piston or a well-tube.
2. n. In printing, the fabric used on printing-presses between the iron platen or cylinder and the sheet to be printed. A soft packing is a blanket of wool or rubber cloth, which equalizes the impression. A hard packing is made of glazed millboard or of smooth hard paper, which prevents indentation.
3. n. In masonry, small stones embedded in mortar, employed to fill up the vacant spaces in the middle of walls; rubble.
4. n. The act of bringing together or manipulating to serve one's own purposes. See pack, transitive verb, 8.
5. n. A system of packing in which metal is used, as metallic rings for piston-packing. Such rings are either so cast as to be elastic, or they are divided into segments and fitted with springs to press them against the interior of the cylinder so as to form a steam-tight contact.
6. n. Tubes of lead or other soft metal filled with some vegetable material, such as hemp or cotton. The ends of the tubes are either forced or soldered together.
7. n. Collusion; trickery; cheating.
8. n. In halma, the stage of the game in which the player gets his men in order on the side of the board farthest from him.
9. n. In shipbuilding, the pieces of wood used to fill up the space between the bilgeways and the bottom of the ship. A large number of long wooden wedges are placed transversely between the packing and bilgeways, and the weight of the vessel is transferred from the building-blocks to the packing before launching the vessel by driving in the wedges.
10. n. In telephony, the crowding together or caking of the particles of carbon in a microphonic transmitter, whereby the sensitiveness of the instrument is impaired.

Wiktionary

1. v. present participle of pack.
2. n. The action of the verb.
3. n. As a concrete noun.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The act or process of one who packs.
2. n. (Mach.) Any material used to pack, fill up, or make close. A substance or piece used to make a joint impervious.
3. n. A thin layer, or sheet, of yielding or elastic material inserted between the surfaces of a flange joint.
4. n. The substance in a stuffing box, through which a piston rod slides.
5. n. A yielding ring, as of metal, which surrounds a piston and maintains a tight fit, as inside a cylinder, etc.
6. n. (Masonry), Rare in the U. S. Same as Filling.
7. n. obsolete A trick; collusion.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. any material used especially to protect something
2. n. the enclosure of something in a package or box
3. n. carrying something in a pack on the back