Shrink-wrap

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A plastic film that is used to protect an item and which during application contracts so it tightly enclose it. countable, uncountable

    "Please order another five rolls of shrink-wrap from the supply house."

  2. 2
    the clinging transparent plastic film that is used to shrinkwrap something wordnet
  3. 3
    The wrapping around an item that has been shrink-wrapped. countable, uncountable

    "Please don't damage the shrink-wrap when you are boxing up the items for shipment."

Verb
  1. 1
    To apply shrink-wrap to (an item).

    "We spent all day shrink-wrapping boxes and now my feet hurt."

  2. 2
    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. derogatory

    "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."

Example

More examples

"Please order another five rolls of shrink-wrap from the supply house."

Related phrases

shrinkwrap license

More for "shrink-wrap"

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