English

Noun

gunny-bag ‎(plural gunny-bags)

1. Gunny sack.
   • 1885, Rudyard Kipling, "The City of Dreadful Night," in The Works of Rudyard Kipling, Delphi Classics, 2013,

     They lie—some face downwards, arms folded, in the dust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curled up dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of grain carts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees in the full glare of the Moon.

   • 1920, F. B. Bradley-Birt, Bengal Fairy Tales, London: John Lane, Part I, Chapter IV, p. 19,

     Returning home, he collected the charcoal, and, putting it into two large gunny-bags, which he placed on the back of one of his cows, one bag on each side, he started for the market for the ostensible purpose of selling their contents.

   • 1922, Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity, London: Macmillan & Co., p. 115,

     Some years ago, when I set out from Calcutta on my voyage to Japan, the first thing that shocked me, with a sense of personal injury, was the ruthless intrusion of the factories for making gunny-bags on both banks of the Ganges.

   • 1938, Xavier Herbert, Capricornia, New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1943, Chapter XI, p. 188,

     […] when Peter had reasoned out the fact that it was better to live in a native camp where there was little food than on one's own plantation where there was none, that careless fellow and his lubra and his wife filled a gunny-bag with their possessions and followed in the track of their relatives.

   • 1942, Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Chapter 12,

     There was one article of Galilean homespun, at the bottom of his gunny-bag, that Justus must not see!

Alternative forms

• gunnybag