dunnages

Noun

dunnage (usually uncountable, plural dunnages)

1. (usually) Scrap material, often wood, used to fill spaces to prevent the shifting of more valuable items during transport, or underneath large or heavy items to raise them slightly above the ground, in order to protect from chafing and wet.
   • When you have got your junks wormed and laid up, take each two pieces, and stop them together; double the middle pieces, and stop them also, and clap a good stop on, to form the eye: then bring them all together upon some dunnage, to keep them up from the deck, to enable you to pass your...1833, “Directions For Making A Rope-rudder, as proposed by Mr. Thomas Unwin, Boatswain in the Royal Navy”, in The Nautical magazine: a journal of papers on subjects connected with maritime affairs...
2. (usually) A charge levied for materials or equipment left on site.
   • The fact that the bakery was paying dunnage on the loaded car until May 25th and that it was not unloaded until after May 21, 1959, is proof that […]1957, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Verbal Behavior, page 19
3. (usually) Personal effects; baggage.
   • The place had the empty and musty feel and smell usual to a dwelling no longer inhabited. Everywhere was a thick litter of discarded and ragged garments, old sea-boots, leaky oilskins -- all the worthless forecastle dunnage of a long voyage.1904, Jack London, chapter 32, in The Sea-Wolf (Macmillan’s Standard Library), New York, N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, →OCLC