bagging

Pluralbaggings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of placing something into a bag.

   The bagging of the order was handled by a new employee on his first shift.

   Proper bagging prevents loose items from spilling during transport.

   Similarpacking, packaging

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of bag.

   Volunteers are bagging sand to hold back the rising river.

   He spent the morning bagging apples at the orchard stand.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every sense of the verb, not only the grocer's one. A hunter is bagging game, a quick guest is bagging the best seat, and in slang a thief may be bagging a wallet or the police bagging a suspect. Note the doubled g before -ing. When the word names the activity itself, it shades into the noun for filling bags.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Cloth or other material used for making bags.

   The merchant ordered several rolls of bagging for the cotton harvest.

   Workers stitched the bagging into sturdy sacks for the grain.

   Similarsacking, burlap, hessian

   Note

   A material noun that also happily takes a plural. Bagging is the stuff on the roll, while baggings are lengths or pieces of it, such as those wrapped around cotton bales. Use the uncountable form for the fabric as a commodity and the plural when you mean the individual coverings cut from it.

4. 4
   nouncolloquialcountable or uncountable

   The pursuit of reaching the summits of as many named peaks as possible, often working through a checklist.

   His weekends revolved around bagging every named peak in the range.

   Bagging the highest summits in each county gave her a clear goal every year.

   Note

   A clipping of peak bagging, and a cheerful borrowing from the hunter's verb. Summits are bagged the way game is bagged: claimed, counted and ticked off a list. The word is casual climbers' talk, so in formal writing the full phrase peak bagging is the safer choice.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   A machine learning technique that improves accuracy and stability by training many models on random samples of the data and combining their predictions.

   The data scientists applied bagging to reduce the variance of their decision-tree model.

   Bagging combines hundreds of weak learners into a single stronger predictor.

   Note

   A word with no sacks in its history. It is built from bootstrap aggregating: each model trains on a bootstrap sample drawn with replacement, and their outputs are averaged or voted. Because it names a method, it stays uncountable. You apply bagging to a model, but you never perform a bagging.

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The technique of ventilating a patient by squeezing a bag-valve-mask device to push air into the lungs.

   Effective bagging requires a tight seal between the mask and the patient's face.

   The team switched to bagging when the ventilator failed mid-procedure.

   Note

   Clinical shorthand that takes its name from the bag in a bag-valve-mask, the device abbreviated BVM. Each squeeze of the self-inflating bag delivers a breath under positive pressure, so the operator's hand does by rhythm what a ventilator does by machine. It belongs to resuscitation and anesthesia, where keeping the mask sealed matters as much as the squeezing.

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