Sacked

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Removed from employment typically due to poor performance or misconduct ; ransacked a place by force, often during war or unrest
2. Dismissed from a position of work for reasons such as failure to perform ; violently robbed or plundered a building or city
3. Terminated from a job usually for unsatisfactory reasons ; plundered or stripped a location through violent attack

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "sacked" is that its modern sense of losing a job comes from a word that once meant plunder. In medieval French, "mettre à sac" was a military command meaning to pillage a town, literally "put it in a bag," since looters stuffed their takings into sacks. The sense of carrying off plunder passed into English and Italian, and the same root also gave us "ransack." The job sense is much newer, attested since 1825. The phrase was "to give (someone) the sack," and it likely refers to a worker leaving with his tools in a sack, or being handed a sack for his personal belongings when dismissed. The idiom itself appears somewhat earlier. The noun behind all this is ancient. English "sack" comes from Old English "sacc," borrowed from Latin "saccus," itself from Greek "sákkos," meaning a bag of coarse cloth. Its origin is probably Semitic, and it is related to Hebrew "śaq," meaning sack or sackcloth.

Synonyms: dismissed, fired, terminated, released, laid off

Antonyms: hired, employed, recruited, engaged, appointed