Word.ws English Dictionary

Packingtown

Packingtown proper noun: an industrial area of Chicago, Illinois, United States, known for its meatpacking industry.

Proper noun

Packingtown

  1. (historical) An industrial area of Chicago, Illinois, United States, known for its meatpacking industry.
    • They had no authority beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local political machine!1905 April–October, Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906, →OCLC
    • By the early 1900s Chicago’s Packingtown had taken mass production to its rational extreme.2025 October 3 (last accessed), “Packingtown”, in Illinois State University, archived from the original on 27 Jul 2024, page 1

Origin of Packingtown

From packing + town.

Questions about Packingtown

What does Packingtown mean?
Packingtown means an industrial area of Chicago, Illinois, United States, known for its meatpacking industry.
What part of speech is Packingtown?
Packingtown is a proper noun.

Words near Packingtown in the dictionary

  1. packing-needles
  2. packinghouse
  3. packinghouses
  4. packingless
  5. packings
  6. Packingtown
  7. packless
  8. packlike
  9. packmaker
  10. packmakers
  11. packmaking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Packingtown (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Packingtown.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/packingtown. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.