What does "pack-year" mean?

A unit of measure for estimating the number of cigarettes a person has previously smoked, equivalent to average number of packs (each containing 20 cigarettes) smoked per day multiplied by the number of years the person has smoked.

Pack-year

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A unit of measure for estimating the number of cigarettes a person has previously smoked, equivalent to average number of packs (each containing 20 cigarettes) smoked per day multiplied by the number of years the person has smoked.

Etymology

Compound of pack + year.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.