gripsack

English

Etymology

From grip +‎ sack.

Noun

gripsack (plural gripsacks)

1. (colloquial, dated) A traveller's bag.
   • 1910, Jack London, “Trust”, in Lost Face:

     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.

   • 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne, chapter 11, in The Wrecker, London, Paris: Cassell & Company, […], →OCLC:

     “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.”

References

“gripsack”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

Anagrams

• ragpicks