sacking

Pluralsackings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of sack.

   Raiders spent three days sacking the city and loading carts with its gold.

   The defense kept sacking the quarterback before he could find an open receiver.

   Note

   Every meaning of the verb travels in this one form, so the object decides it: an army sacking a city plunders it, a defense sacking the quarterback tackles him behind the line, and a club sacking its coach dismisses him, a colloquial use. After be it makes the progressive (they are sacking him); as a subject it is a gerund (sacking the coach solved nothing).

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The dismissal of an employee from a job.

   The coach's sacking was announced minutes after the final whistle.

   Union leaders called the sackings unfair and demanded that the workers be rehired.

   Similardismissal, firing

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Cheap, coarse cloth of the kind used for making sacks.

   The potatoes were piled in a corner under a sheet of damp sacking.

   She stuffed the scarecrow's body with straw and sewed it up in sacking.

   Similarburlap, hessian, sackcloth

   Note

   This is cloth counted as a material, so it takes no article and no plural: a sheet of sacking, a handful of sacking, wrapped in sacking. That is the quickest way to tell it from the dismissal, which is counted like any event: a sacking, two sackings, a wave of sackings.

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