bundle

BUN-duhl/ˈbʌn.dl̩/

19 meanings of bundle

1
tied bunchnouncountable
A number of objects held together by being tied or wrapped.
The farmer stacked bundles of straw against the barn wall.
A bundle of dried noodles costs less than a dollar at the corner market.
Similarbunch, sheaf
Note
The sense the rest of the word grows from: Middle English bundel, from Middle Dutch bondel or Old English byndele, "a binding, a fastening with bands". What makes a bundle is the tie or wrapping, not the contents, which can be almost anything: straw, noodles, old clothes. Goldsmith retells the fable of the rods which, once united in a bundle, no strength could bend.
2
tie togetherverbtransitive
To tie or wrap things together so that they form a bundle.
Bundle the cables with zip ties so they don't tangle behind the desk.
Volunteers bundled the donated coats in twine and loaded them onto the truck.
Similarbind, tie, wrap
Oppositeuntie
3
package dealnouncountable
A set of products or services sold together as a single unit.
The cable company offers a bundle of internet, phone and television service.
The new laptop ships with a software bundle that includes an office suite and antivirus protection.
Similarpackage
4
dress warmlyverbintransitive
To dress in warm clothing; usually used with up.
It's below zero this morning, so bundle up.
Fans bundled up in parkas and blankets for the late-season game.
Similarwrap
5
dress warmlyverbtransitive
To dress someone in warm clothing.
Remember to bundle the kids up properly; the wind chill is brutal today.
She bundled her grandson up in a scarf, mittens and two sweaters.
Similarwrap
Note
The picture behind it is the noun's: a person wrapped in layers like a parcel. Up usually joins it, and the object can sit before or after the particle, as in bundle the kids up or bundle up the kids. Drop the object and the phrase turns to dressing yourself warmly: bundle up, it's below zero.
6
tied bunchnouncountable
A package wrapped or tied up so that it can be carried.
The peddler set down his bundle and untied the cloth to show his wares.
Families crossed the bridge on foot, their belongings in bundles on their shoulders.
Similarpackage, parcel, pack
7
large amountnouncolloquialcountable
A large amount of something, especially money.
He made a bundle in real estate before he turned forty.
Fixing the roof properly is going to cost us a bundle.
Similarpile, mint
Note
Money is what usually fills this bundle: you make a bundle, or something costs a bundle, and the verb in front decides which way the money went. In Paul Vautin's Turn It Up!, a man can go to the races, do a bundle, and come home laughing as if nothing had happened; to do a bundle there is to lose a great deal.
8
push carelesslyverbtransitive
To push, put, carry or send something into a particular place in a hurried or clumsy way.
In the final seconds, two players tried to bundle the ball over the goal line.
He bundled the wet towels into the back seat and slammed the door.
Similarshove, stuff, push
Note
Haste or clumsiness is the point, which is why football reports use it for a scrappy goal: a player who bundles the ball over the line has not struck it cleanly. Melville stretches the word to its grimmest in Moby-Dick (1851), where death in whaling is "a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity."
9
send away quicklyverbtransitive
To hustle someone or something along, sending them off quickly.
Security staff moved in to bundle the protester out of the hall.
The children were bundled off to their grandparents for the weekend.
Similarhustle, rush, hurry
Note
The person bundled is cargo, not a participant: someone else does the hurrying, and the verb nearly always comes with a direction such as off, out or into. In Theodore Hook's Gilbert Gurney, the speaker and his gallant second are unmercifully bundled into their own hackney coach. When people hurry themselves away, the verb becomes the intransitive bundle off.
10
sell togetherverbtransitive
To package hardware and software together and sell them as one product.
Camera makers often bundle editing software with their high-end models.
The manufacturer bundled its own operating system with every machine it shipped.
Similarpackage, include
Note
The software typically arrives preinstalled or in the same box, its cost folded into the price of the hardware, so the buyer never pays for it as a separate item. The opposite practice, pricing each piece on its own, is called unbundling. What the customer ends up holding is a bundle in the retail sense.

11
leave quicklyverbintransitive
To get ready to leave, or to set off hurriedly and without ceremony; used with away, off, or out.
As soon as the meeting ended, the reporters bundled away to file their stories.
Pack what you need tonight so we can bundle off at first light.
Similarhurry, rush
12
fiber clusternouncountable
A cluster of muscle or nerve fibers bound closely together.
Under the microscope, each bundle of muscle fibers is wrapped in a thin sheath of connective tissue.
The surgeon took care not to damage the bundle of nerves running along the jaw.
Note
In anatomy, bundle names the middle tier of a muscle's build: single fibers are grouped into bundles, and bundles make up the whole muscle, each level wrapped in its own sheath of connective tissue. The technical term is fascicle, which serves for bundles of nerve fibers too; bundle is the plainer word for the same structure.
13
court papersnouncountable
The organized set of documents prepared for a court case and referred to during it; a court bundle.
Counsel asked the witness to turn to page 214 of the bundle.
The paralegals worked late indexing the bundle for Monday's hearing.
Note
Lawyers speak of the court bundle or trial bundle, and in the courtroom it is simply "the bundle". It is paginated and indexed so that judge, counsel and witness can all turn to the same page the moment a document is mentioned, which is why hearings are full of references to tabs and page numbers.
14
computer foldernouncountable
A directory holding a set of related resources, such as source code, as in an application bundle.
On a Mac, each application is stored as a bundle containing its executable code and resources.
The developer copied the new icons into the bundle's Resources folder.
Note
On Mac OS X the Finder shows an application bundle as a single icon, so a program can be moved or deleted in one piece, even though underneath it is an ordinary folder of files. Developers open it with Show Package Contents to reach the code, images and settings inside.
15
word groupnouncountable
A sequence of two or more words that occurs very often in a language but is not an idiom; also called a lexical bundle.
Researchers compared how often four-word bundles like "as a result of" appear in student essays and published articles.
Learning each bundle as a single unit can help students write more fluently.
Note
Corpus linguists find bundles by counting, not by meaning: they search a large collection of texts for strings of words that keep recurring. A bundle therefore need not be a complete phrase, and strings such as "in the case of" or "I don't know if" qualify even though they break off mid-structure. That is the line between a bundle and an idiom: one is defined by frequency, the other by meaning.
16
mathnouncountable
A topological space made up of a base space together with fibers that project onto it.
The tangent bundle of a sphere gathers all of its tangent planes into a single space.
In gauge theory, physicists describe force fields using bundles over spacetime.
Note
Every small patch of a bundle looks like a plain product of a piece of the base with the fiber; the interest lies in how those patches fit together globally. A cylinder and a Mobius strip are both bundles of line segments over a circle, but only the Mobius strip twists. Mathematicians usually say fiber bundle, and a tangent bundle is one kind.
17
paper unitnouncountable
A unit of paper equal to two reams, that is, 1,000 sheets.
The order came to four bundles, which is eight reams, or 4,000 sheets.
The print shop sold the paper by the bundle rather than by the ream.
18
pile onverbslangintransitive
Of a group, to pile on top of one person in a heap of bodies; to dogpile.
The moment the final whistle blew, the players bundled onto their goalkeeper.
At recess the kids would shout and bundle on whoever had the ball.
Similardogpile
Note
It is slang and a close twin of dogpile: one person goes down and everyone else lands on top. It belongs to speech, with on or onto pointing at the person underneath; a news report would more likely say that teammates piled on top of the scorer.
19
share a bedverbdatedintransitive
To share a bed with someone without undressing.
Snowed in at the cabin, the hikers agreed to bundle rather than freeze, keeping their coats on.
The young couple bundled under the quilts all night, fully clothed and talking until dawn.
Note
This is a dated verb with a sociable grammar: one person bundles with another, or two people bundle together, clothes kept on. Washington Irving, writing as Diedrich Knickerbocker in A History of New York (1809), sends Van Corlear through the villages to eat pumpkin pies, dance at country frolics, and bundle with the Yankee lasses.

Practice

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Origin

From Middle English bundel, from Middle Dutch bondel or Old English byndele ("a binding; tying; fastening with bands"), both from Proto-Germanic *bundil-, a derivative of *bundą ("bundle"). Compare bindle, Dutch bundel and German Bündel.