Dictionary

gripsack en · NOUN

Etymology

From grip + sack.

Meanings

1. (colloquial, dated) A traveller's bag.
   • As for Bondell's gripsack, it was inconceivable that forty pounds could weigh so much. It pressed him down like a mountain, and he looked back with unbelief to the year before, when he had climbed that same pass with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back. If those loads had weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, then Bondell's grip weighed five hundred. 1910, Jack London, “Trust”, in Lost Face:
   • “Well,” drawled Nares, “there's sixty pounds of niggerhead on the quay, isn't there? and twenty pounds of salts; and I never travel without some pain-killer in my gripsack.” 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne, chapter 11, in The Wrecker, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, […], →OCLC:

Forms