saco

Forms

saco m (plural sacos)^[1] Old Spanish texts write saco and sacos, and once the Latinising saccos, in a 12th-century document of the Reconquest of the Ebro valley.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish saco, inherited from Latin saccus (“sack, bag; coarse garment”).^[3][4][5][1] The Latin word was borrowed from Ancient Greek σάκκος (sákkos, “sack; sackcloth”), which also meant coarse cloth of goats' hair and a rough cloak made of it.^[6][7][1] Corominas takes the Greek word to be of Phoenician origin.^[3][4] Wiktionary calls it a widely borrowed Mediterranean trade word, most likely from a Semitic language, and compares Biblical Hebrew שַׂק (sak).^[1] Corriente, Pereira and Vicente trace it further back to Egyptian ś3q.^[8]

The same Latin word is Portuguese saco, Catalan sac, French sac, Italian sacco and Romanian sac.^[9][10]

The garment sense goes back to Latin: the Church Fathers used the Latin word for a coarse haircloth garment, and biblical Greek used the word for the penitent's hair shirt.^[3][11] Some scholars connected the sense “jacket” with Latin sagus, the source of sayo, but Corominas rejects this on phonetic grounds and treats it as a sense of the same word.^[3]

The sense “sack, plunder” came from the same word in Italian, which had extracted it from saccomanno (“plunderer”), itself from German Sackmann (“army baggage boy; plunderer”), a compound of the words for “sack” and “man”.^[3][4][12] García de Diego instead derives this sense from sacar.^[13]

Earliest recorded meaning

The Fazienda de Ultra Mar (c. 1200, in a 13th-century copy) tells how Joseph had the sacks of his brothers filled with grain: mando que enplenassen los sacos de cevera “he ordered the sacks to be filled with grain”.^[14][15] Corominas's first record is Berceo's Milagros (1220–1250), where a man carries all his money en un saco atado “tied up in a sack”.^[3][4]

Semantic evolution

The basic sense “sack, bag” has been in use in every period, as in every Romance language.^[3] As the name of a garment the word is recorded from 1351, in the Cortes, and Quevedo uses it for a coarse frock of sackcloth.^[3][4] Autoridades defines it as a rough garment of sackcloth worn by mountain and country people, or as a penitent's habit.^[16]

In the Americas saco became the general word for a man's jacket, from Argentina and Chile to the Antilles, Mexico and New Mexico, and in the Río de la Plata it went so far that the original sense passed to bolsa; from there it was borrowed into Guarani.^[3] The same jacket sense is found in the Canaries and in Andalusia.^[3][17] Today the DAMER records it as the jacket of a man's suit in almost every Spanish-speaking country of the Americas, and as a cardigan in several; in Dominican and Venezuelan baseball it also names a base.^[18]

Nineteenth-century dictionaries record set phrases such as no echar en saco roto “not to forget something one has heard, so as to use it later”.^[19][20] In Spanish slang saco has meant a thousand-peseta note and the backside, as in vulgar phrases with tomar por saco.^[21] The Spanish word passed into Tagalog and Cebuano as sako.^[1]

Timeline

• c. 1200 – the Fazienda de Ultra Mar speaks of sacos filled with grain.^[14][15]
• 1220–1250 – Berceo uses the word in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora.^[3][4]
• 1351 – first record as the name of a garment, in the Cortes.^[3][4]
• 1440–1460 – DICCA-XV records saco “plunder”; the DCECH's first record of this sense is the sack of Rome of 1527.^[22][3]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija gives saco o costal with Latin saccus;^[23][4] saca “large sack” appears at the same time.^[23][4]
• 1519 – first record from the Americas, in Puerto Rico, in the sense “plunder”.^[24]
• 1726–1739 – Autoridades defines the bag, the coarse garment of country people and penitents, and the short Roman war garment.^[16]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary gives the etymology from Latin saccus and adds the sense “large coat”.^[25]
• 1927 – the Academy's manual dictionary marks the sense “jacket” as Canarian and American.^[17]

Meanings

Noun

1. A sack or bag: a container of cloth, leather, paper or similar material, open at one end.^[5][1]
2. The contents of a sack: un saco de patatas.^[5][26]
3. (usually pejorative, figurative) A person or thing that holds a great many others: Aquel discurso fue un saco de tópicos.^[5]
4. A coarse, rough garment of sackcloth or sayal.^[5]
5. A large loose coat, and generally any loose garment that does not fit the body.^[5]
6. (historical) A short garment worn by the ancient Romans in time of war.^[5]
7. (historical) The English sack, a dry measure of somewhat over a hectolitre.^[5][1]
8. plunder, sacking: the act of looting a place, as in entrar a saco.^[5]
9. In the ball game of pelota, the serve.^[5]
10. (biology) A sac: a bag-shaped organ or part of the body that serves as a reservoir: saco lagrimal.^[5]
11. (nautical) A bay or inlet, especially one with a narrow mouth.^[5]
12. (Canaries, Latin America) A jacket, the jacket of a suit: Se quitó el saco porque hacía calor.^[5][18][1]
13. (Uruguay) A woman's coat.^[5]

Word family

• saca
• ensacar
• saquete
• saquero

Related words

• saquear
• sacomano
• insacular
• Latin saccus
• Portuguese saco

Usage notes

Common phrases include saco de dormir “sleeping bag” and no echar en saco roto “to take good note of”.^[5][19] In the Cueva language of Panama, the chroniclers of the early 16th century recorded saco as the title of a chief below the cacique; this word has nothing to do with the Spanish noun.^[27][24] Vox notes that the noun is not related to the verb sacar, whose first person singular is also saco.^[28]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. saco
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 5, 121
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. saco
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. saco
6. ^ Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
8. ^ Corriente, Federico; Pereira, Christophe; Vicente, Ángeles (2019), Dictionnaire des emprunts ibéro-romans: emprunts à l'arabe et aux langues du monde islamique (Encyclopédie linguistique d'Al-Andalus 3), Berlin: De Gruyter, p. s.v. saco
9. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
10. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 5806
11. ^ Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill
12. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. saco
13. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 5805
14. ^ a b Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. saco
15. ^ a b Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (2026), Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA): semi-paleographic transcriptions of Old Spanish texts, ed. Francisco Gago Jover et al., https://www.hispanicseminary.org
16. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 6, 11
17. ^ a b Real Academia Española (2021–), Tesoro de los diccionarios históricos de la lengua española (TDHLE): Diccionario histórico (1933–1936), its unpublished slips, Diccionario histórico (1960–1996), DHECan, DHECR, DHEVen, https://www.rae.es/tdhle, p. s.v. saco
18. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. saco
19. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1843), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 9th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Francisco María Fernández, p. 648
20. ^ Salvá, Vicente (1846), Nuevo diccionario de la lengua castellana, París: Librería de Don Vicente Salvá, p. 970
21. ^ León, Víctor (1980), Diccionario de argot español y lenguaje popular, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, p. s.v. saco
22. ^ Lleal, Coloma (dir.), DICCA-XV: Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Grup d'Estudis d'Història de la Llengua (GHCL), https://ghcl.ub.edu/diccaxv, p. s.v. saco
23. ^ a b Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 412
24. ^ a b Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. saco
25. ^ Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 949
26. ^ Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. saco
27. ^ Friederici, Georg (1947), Amerikanistisches Wörterbuch, Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter, p. 550
28. ^ Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. saco