packet

plural packets · alternative obsolete pacquet

1. A small pack or package; a little bundle or parcel

   a packet of letters

   3 more examples

   Don't throw the crisp packet on the floor!

   a packet of biscuits

   (archaic) a travel bag containing clothing, nightwear and other accessories.

2. nauticalOriginally, a vessel employed by government to convey dispatches or mails; hence, a vessel employed in conveying dispatches, mails, passengers, and goods, and having fixed days of sailing; a mail boat. Packet boat, ship, vessel (Wikipedia).

   The wooden jetty on the East Pier had become worm-eaten and was demolished, but the Admiralty lent an old hulk to serve as a rough-and-ready packet facility.

   1960 May 28, K. A. Murray, “Carlisle Pier, Dun Laoghaire”, in Railway Magazine, page 302

   2 more examples

   With just the turn of a shoulder she indicated the water front, where, at the end of the dock on which they stood, lay the good ship, Mount Vernon, river packet, the black smoke already pouring from her stacks.

   1910, Emerson Hough, “A Lady in Company”, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC

   Fishguard Harbour, constructed some 60 years ago by the G.W.R., became the packet port for G.W.R. services to Waterford and Rosslare - the latter port itself was a new venture partly under G.W.R. auspices - and to Cork.

   1961 August, “New traffic flows in South Wales”, in Trains Illustrated, page 492

3. biologyA specimen envelope containing small, dried plants or containing parts of plants when attached to a larger sheet.

   1 more example

   With fresh material, taxonomic conclusions are leavened by recognition that the material examined reflects the site it occupied; a herbarium packet gives one only a small fraction of the data desirable for sound conclusions. Herbarium material does not, indeed, allow one to extrapolate safely: what you see is what you get[…].

   1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, Chicago, Ill.: Field Museum of Natural History, →ISBN, page vii

4. computingA small fragment of data as transmitted on some types of network, notably Ethernet networks (Wikipedia).
5. computingA protocol data unit of the Internet Protocol.
6. computingA message sent over a transport layer protocol.

   The Minecraft server accepts connections from TCP clients and communicates with them using packets. A packet is a sequence of bytes sent over the TCP connection.

   2024 September 28 (last accessed), “Protocol”, in wiki.vg, archived from the original on 26 Sep 2024, Definitions

7. South AfricaA plastic bag.

   2012 August 6, Wendy Knowler, Plastic packets: who bags the profits?

8. slangSynonym of package (“male genitalia”).

   A sleeping, silver-haired man, probably about fifty, couldn’t close his legs because of the size of his packet.

   2020, Paul Mendez, Rainbow Milk, Dialogue Books (2021), page 157

   Synonyms: package

9. informalA large amount of money.

   It'll cost a packet to fix this.

present singular third person packets · participle present packeting · participle past packeted · past packeted · alternative obsolete pacquet

1. transitiveTo make up into a packet or bundle.
2. transitiveTo send in a packet or dispatch vessel.

   [H]er husband / VVas packetted to France, to ſtudy courtſhip, / Under forſooth a colour of employment, / Employment, yea of honour.

   c. 1635–1636 (date written), Iohn Ford [i.e., John Ford], The Fancies, Chast and Noble: […], London: […] E[lizabeth] P[urslowe] for Henry Seile, […], published 1638, →OCLC, Act I, page 2

3. intransitiveTo ply with a packet or dispatch boat.
4. InternettransitiveTo subject to a denial-of-service attack in which a large number of data packets are sent.

   1 more example

   2007, Committee on Improving Cybersecurity Research in the United States, Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace Typically, one hacker will annoy another; the offended party replies by launching a denial-of-service attack against the offender. These attacks—known as packeting—tend to be of limited duration […]