Packaging is everything a product comes wrapped in — the box, the plastic film, the foam corners, the little bag of silica gel. The heap left on the floor after a birthday.
It is uncountable: you have a lot of packaging, never a packaging or two packagings. The word covers the design as much as the material, because the wrapping is doing the selling — the colour of a cereal box, the weight of a phone box that opens slowly on purpose. Shops and makers argue about excess packaging, recyclable packaging and packaging waste, and those arguments are political now. It reaches ideas as well, so the packaging of a policy is the way it has been dressed up for the public. The verb behind it is package, and the person who plans the box is a packaging designer.
1nounpackagingThe materials used to wrap and protect something for sale or transport.~77%
“Most of the packaging went straight into the recycling.”
synonyms: wrapping
2nounmarketingThe design of that wrapping, seen as a way of attracting buyers.~21%
“The packaging does more work than the advert.”
3nounpresentedThe way something is presented in order to make it appealing.~2%
“The policy is old; only the packaging is new.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 30 sentences found in the wild and placed 28 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.