Sacking

How to spell sacking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sacking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sacking mean?

1. nounThe act of dismissing someone from their job.
2. nounCoarse woven material, such as hessian or burlap, used to make sacks.
3. nounThe violent plundering of a captured town or city.

Sacking in a sentence

• The manager faced sacking after the missing funds were discovered.

• She wrapped the seed potatoes in rough sacking to keep them dry.

• The sacking of the city left its libraries in ashes.

• The sudden sacking of the finance director shook the whole department.

• The antique chair was upholstered with plain brown sacking.

• Historians still debate the brutal sacking of the ancient port.

Where does sacking come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word sack travelled a long way before picking up its modern senses. It traces back to the Latin saccus, meaning a bag or sack, which itself came from Greek sakkos, a word for a coarse cloth bag that ultimately has Semitic roots (compare Hebrew saq). Old English borrowed it early as sacc for a large bag, and the coarse fabric used to make such bags became known as sacking. The 'dismissal' sense is more colourful: from the 1820s 'to give someone the sack' meant to send a tradesman away carrying the bag that held his tools, and 'sacking' grew from that idiom into the everyday word for losing a job. A quite separate strand, the plundering of a captured town, comes through French 'mettre a sac' (to put to the bag, meaning to loot), so all three senses circle back to the same humble bag.

How the word is built

• sack (from Latin saccus: bag/sack, also 'to put in a bag' then 'to dismiss')
• -ing (gerund/noun suffix)