container — English Dictionary

Noun

1. Someone who contains; something that contains. An item in which objects, materials or data can be stored or transported.

2. Someone who contains; something that contains. A very large, typically metal, box used for transporting goods.

   Synonyms

   cargo containershipping container

   Examples

   More examples (3)

   Will container development merely bring about a substitution for the body of the covered wagon? Probably not, in his view, but he believes that the size and tonnage of the container are likely to increase pari passu with the lifting capacity of handling appliances.

   The specifiers of the Freightliner network had the foresight to base the rail journey on carrying ISO containers which are 8ft wide and originally 8ft tall (although now increased to a height of 9ft 6ins), with a variety of lengths.

   On a damp and blustery morning, three-metre swells crash into the cracked hull of the MSC Baltic III, which was grounded on a pinnacle of rock on the west coast of Newfoundland earlier this year. The wind carries whiffs of rotten egg. Salvage crews in hard hats and neon yellow jackets inch along in a temporary cable car suspended high over the churning Atlantic. In a province with a long and dangerous maritime history, the Baltic's grounding in the roiling shallows of Cedar Cove last February is a story Newfoundlanders retell with incredulity. The cargo ship, en route to Corner Brook from Montreal, lost power in the early morning of Feb. 15 during a ferocious blizzard. The ship, packed with hundreds of containers of lumber, textiles, plastic beads, legumes and car parts, plus 1,600 metric tonnes of fuel, careered into the only safe harbour along a coast of towering cliffs. All 20 crew members were airlifted off the ship in a harrowing rescue by the Royal Canadian Air Force. Over the following months, salvage crews offloaded most of the 470 containers and siphoned out the fuel, which had hardened into an asphalt-like substance, in a multistage operation that involved heating it for days. At risk were local wildlife — migratory birds and the capelin and lobster that local fish harvesters rely on for their livelihoods. The goal of the work is to ready the ship for eventual dismantling and removal from the shoreline.

3. Someone who contains; something that contains. Someone who holds people in their seats or in a (reasonably) calm state.

   Usage

   • broadly

4. Someone who contains; something that contains. A file format that can hold various types of data.

   Synonyms

   container format

   Examples

   As the MP4 container can store audio, video, or both, the M4A naming and file extension is used to hint that this MP4 container holds solely audio information.

5. Someone who contains; something that contains. An abstract data type whose instances are collections of other objects.

   Examples

   This advantage is the primary incentive for using a list container, rather than a vector or a deque.

6. Someone who contains; something that contains. Any user interface component that can hold further (child) components.

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   Flex automatically creates a TabBar container at the top of the TabNavigator container, with a tab corresponding to each child container. Each tab can have its own label and icon.

7. Someone who contains; something that contains. A web container.

8. Someone who contains; something that contains. A bundle consisting of operating system, application code and dependencies to be run sandboxed inside a virtualized environment; (by extension) the environment itself.

   Synonyms

   software container

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   Generally, when people think of serverless computing, they tend to think of applications with back-ends that run on third-party services, also described as code running on ephemeral containers.

   The application components all run in containers. They are isolated like VMs but lightweight and efficient like PaaS services.

9. Someone who contains; something that contains. A type of cryptic device where one word is inserted into another.

   Examples

   As with all varieties of cryptic clues, the container device can be used in conjunction with other devices, especially in more complex cryptic crosswords.

   Container word clues are actually three clues in one.

   More examples (1)

   We have already mentioned 'in' having multiple uses; 'round' or 'around' might be a container indicator or a reversal indicator; 'without' might be a container indicator or a deletion indicator, and so on.

Noun

1. any object that can be used to hold things (especially a large metal boxlike object of standardized dimensions that can be loaded from one form of transport to another)

   Broader terms

   instrumentalityinstrumentationmeans