A load, a group, and an action
In current English, pack covers more than one kind of thing. It can be the bundle on a walker's back, a sealed set of cards or cigarettes, a troop of wolves, a mass of sea ice, or a clique of people spoken of as a single body. The matching verb is just as busy: to stow clothes in a case, to crowd a hall, to press snow until it holds, or to carry a gun. Those uses look scattered. They grew from one mercantile picture: goods wrapped, bound, and sent along a trade route.
The origin of the word pack is a borrowing, not a quiet native survival from Old English. Early thirteenth-century English already has pak and pake for a bundle of cloth or other merchandise, and for a bag used to carry things. That is the oldest solid English record. What arrived was a North Sea trading term.
Wool, Flanders, and a wrapped bale
The likeliest source is a Low German and Dutch cluster: Middle Dutch pac or pack, Middle Low German pak, Middle Flemish pac, all meaning a bundle. Continental forms are attested from the late twelfth century. One of the earliest known uses is at Ghent around 1199, where pac already names a commercial bundle. English contact with that vocabulary was practical. Medieval English wool went to the Low Countries in huge volume, and packing was part of shipping and customs work.
Students of Low Dutch influence on English have long tied the loan to that Flanders wool road. The Flemish verb pakken shows up in wool-trade records early; English formed its own verb from the noun a little later. Anglo-French empaker in the late thirteenth century and Medieval Latin paccare, both Germanic in origin, may have helped the verb settle. Historical dictionaries note that the verb appears early in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Norman French precisely because English wool went chiefly to the Low Countries.
A minority alternative is Old Norse pakki. That form exists, but later Scandinavian evidence also looks like a borrowing from Low German rather than an independent northern coinage. Standard dictionaries therefore prefer Dutch or Low German, sometimes leaving Norse as a second possibility. Some reconstructions posit a Proto-West Germanic ancestor and even an unattested Old English form; those trees are tidy, not proven. The cautious account is that English took a Low Countries packing word.
Where the trail stops
Past the Dutch and Low German nouns, the deeper root is unknown. The word seems originally at home in that coastal belt rather than in Germanic as a very old inherited item shared with every sister language. Italian pacco is a Dutch loan. French pacque and later paquet are generally traced to Flemish. German Pack came in from the Low German side.
A nearby family of bag-words sits in the same field without explaining the p-form. Old Norse baggi, Middle English bagge (modern bag), and related Romance items such as Old French bague all mean a sack or bundle. Whether pack and bag are distant relatives, substrate cousins, or accidental neighbors is unclear. A comparison with Old Turkic bag, also a bundle, has been offered and generally dropped: the word is too narrowly Dutch and Low German for an early Altaic loan to be a convincing story.
The English base itself is morphologically plain: a short root with no living prefix or suffix. The verb is derived from the noun. Later English built a large family around it, including packer, packing, package, packet, packhorse, and packcloth. Several of those already had Low Dutch models in the same commercial setting.
From bale to cards, ice, and wolves
The first English sense is concrete: a bundle enclosed in wrapping and bound with cords, the unit in which cloth and other goods traveled. From that unit, the language extended the word in two social directions. By the late fourteenth century pack could mean a set of people, usually spoken of with contempt. Only in the mid-fifteenth century is it clearly used for hunting animals that run together. The insulting human collective is the older one; the wolf pack and the hound pack come after.
The same idea of a complete, bound set then attached itself to objects that are not literally tied with rope. A full set of playing cards is a pack from the 1590s. Floating ice gathered into a mass is recorded near the end of the eighteenth century. Factory-bundled cigarettes appear in the nineteenth. In the twentieth century the word covers a framed knapsack and, in wartime slang, a group of submarines. A pack of lies, attested in the eighteenth century, keeps the old collective of low character and applies it to falsehoods. From the sixteenth century, naughty pack could brand a person as worthless or disreputable.
The verb followed the noun. By later Middle English it meant to put things together into a pack. Dictionaries disagree on the first English date: some place a verb as early as about 1280, others in the late fourteenth or even the fifteenth century. The order of senses is clearer. Mid-century uses add crowding and compacting, and also leaving: to pack off is to go, or to send someone away. Filling a container methodically is in place by the late fifteenth century. Pressing dirt or snow until it holds is a nineteenth-century refinement of the compacting sense.
One group of meanings does not come from the bundle at all. Elizabethan English sometimes confused pack with pact. To pack the cards, and later to pack a jury or a court, is to arrange the set so that the result is fixed. That is secret agreement, not wrapping. From a different line, carrying goods in a pack in the early nineteenth century generalized to carrying anything, then to delivering force: a blow that packs a wallop in the twentieth century, and underworld pack heat for carrying a gun.
A date that belongs to a port
The useful dating is not a reconstructed Indo-European root, which this word does not securely have, but a port and a commodity. By about 1225 English already had packe and pakke as names for a wrapped bale, almost certainly because Flemish and Low German packers were part of the wool business. Dutch pak still sits beside the English noun as the same commercial word, while Italian pacco shows how far the Dutch form traveled once the bale had a name. The animal pack, the card pack, and the hiking pack are later pictures drawn on that bale.