Haversack
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A small, strong bag carried on the back or the shoulder, usually with only one strap, and originally made of canvas.
"And most significant, these hordes of nonmotorized tourists, hungry for a taste of the difficult, the original, the real, do not consist solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don’t know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children."
- 2 a bag carried by a strap on your back or shoulder wordnet
- 3 An oat-sack, or nosebag for a horse. archaic
Example
More examples"And most significant, these hordes of nonmotorized tourists, hungry for a taste of the difficult, the original, the real, do not consist solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don’t know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children."
Etymology
From French havresac, from Low German Haaversack and/or German Habersack, Hafersack (literally “oat-sack”), from Hafer + Sack. Compare also Dutch haverzak.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.