Word.ws English Dictionary

shrink-wrapping

shrink-wrapping is the present participle and gerund of shrink-wrap.

Meaning of shrink-wrap

Verb

shrink-wrap (third-person singular simple present shrink-wraps, present participle shrink-wrapping, simple past and past participle shrink-wrapped)

  1. To apply shrink-wrap to (an item).
    • We spent all day shrink-wrapping boxes and now my feet hurt.
  2. (derogatory) To reconstruct an extinct creature known from its fossils by depicting it with minimal soft tissue, yielding a thinner and less accurate representation of the creature.
    • Such shrink-wrapped models gave generations of schoolchildren mental images of dinosaurs that are probably much uglier and scrawnier than the creatures were in reality.

See all 4 meanings of shrink-wrap

Questions about shrink-wrapping

What is shrink-wrapping the present participle and gerund of?
Shrink-wrapping is the present participle and gerund of shrink-wrap.

Words near shrink-wrapping in the dictionary

  1. shrink-swell
  2. shrink-wrap
  3. shrink-wrap license
  4. shrink-wrap licenses
  5. shrink-wrapped
  6. shrink-wrapping
  7. shrink-wraps
  8. shrinkability
  9. shrinkable
  10. shrinkage
  11. shrinkageproof

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shrink-wrapping (page history and authors); shrink-wrap (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: “shrink-wrapping.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shrink-wrapping. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.