bag and baggage

English

Pronunciation

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Noun

bag and baggage (uncountable)

1. (chiefly UK) All one's possessions.
   • 1941 December, Kenneth Brown, “The Newmarket & Chesterford Railway—II”, in Railway Magazine, page 533:

     Hudson personally would not face the music at that meeting and the business could hardly proceed for groans and hisses and cries of "Hudson! Hudson! Why is Hudson not here?" and so the ungrateful shareholders to whom Hudson had generously paid dividends out of their own capital cast out Hudson bag and baggage, including therein the agreement with the Newmarket Railway.

   • 1989, John P. Murphy (annotator and editor), Jesuit Latin Poets of the 17th and 18th Centuries, page 85,

     They did not wait the two months granted, but made a quick decision and picked up bag and baggage, and after leaving four Fathers to care for the Catholics, left on carts and on foot for Antwerp.

   • 1998, David A. Martin, “Chapter 1: Obstacles to the Effective Enforcement of Immigration Laws in the United States”, in Kay Hailbronner, David A. Martin, Hiroshi Motomura, editors, Immigration Controls: The Search for Workable Policies in Germany and the United States, page 25:

     For many years, INS regulations required that deportable aliens be issued a "bag-and-baggage" letter notifying them of their obligation to appear for deportation at a time no sooner than seventy-two hours after service of the notice. […] Sensibly, the INS amended their regulations in 1986 to eliminate the bag-and-baggage letter, instead assuring that the INS would hold the apprehended person for a minimum of seventy-two hours before removal, […] .

   • 2002, Joseph H. Maddox, Save the Day, page 79:

     With bag and baggage, they, along with about six hundred other servicemen of various US Forces, were herded into olive drab military buses and transported to San Francisco, where their ship was waiting, the USNS General Walker.

Adverb

bag and baggage (not comparable)

1. (chiefly UK) With all one's possessions.
   • 1857, Robert Fortune, A Residence Among the Chinese, Digital Print, published 2012, page 94:

     I could go from valley to valley and from hill to hill; I could “bring up” when it was necessary; and when my labours were finished in one place, I could go on, bag and baggage, to another.

   • 1906 May–October, Jack London, chapter IV, in White Fang, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., published October 1906, →OCLC, part 3 (The Gods of the Wild):

     The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was preparing to go off to the fall hunting.

   • 2011, Stanford D. Carman, Wake And Reunion, page 125:

     In early February the North China Marines arrived, bag and baggage, decked out with full uniforms, overcoats and fur-lined hats.

Translations

with all one's possessions

• Czech: se vším všudy, sakumprásk (cs)
• Finnish: kimpsut ja kampsut (fi)
• French: avec armes et bagages (fr)
• German: mit Sack und Pack (de), mit Kind und Kegel (de)
• Swedish: pick och pack (sv)

Further reading

• “bag and baggage” in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman.
• “bag and baggage”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• “bag and baggage”, in Collins English Dictionary.
• “bag and baggage”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “bag and baggage” (UK) in Macmillan English Dictionary.