packing

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

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

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Collusion; trickery; cheating.
• noun 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.
• noun In printing, the fabric used on printing-presses between the iron platen or cylinder and the sheet to be printed.
• noun In masonry, small stones embedded in mortar, employed to fill up the vacant spaces in the middle of walls; rubble.
• noun The act of bringing together or manipulating to serve one's own purposes. See pack, transitive verb, 8.
• noun 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.
• noun 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.
• noun 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.
• noun 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.
• noun In telephony, the crowding together or caking of the particles of carbon in a microphonic transmitter, whereby the sensitiveness of the instrument is impaired.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act or process of one who packs.
• noun (Mach.) Any material used to pack, fill up, or make close.
• noun A thin layer, or sheet, of yielding or elastic material inserted between the surfaces of a flange joint.
• noun The substance in a stuffing box, through which a piston rod slides.
• noun A yielding ring, as of metal, which surrounds a piston and maintains a tight fit, as inside a cylinder, etc.
• noun (Masonry), Rare in the U. S. Same as Filling.
• noun obsolete A trick; collusion.
• noun (Bridge Building) the arrangement, side by side, of several parts, as bars, diagonals, a post, etc., on a pin at the bottom of a chord.
• noun a stuffing box. See under Stuffing.
• noun a powerful press for baling cotton, wool, hay, etc.
• noun See Packing, 2 (c), and Illust. of Piston.
• noun A sheet prepared for packing hydropathic patients.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• verb Present participle of pack.
• noun The action of the verb.
• noun As a concrete noun.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun any material used especially to protect something
• noun the enclosure of something in a package or box
• noun carrying something in a pack on the back