What does this term derive from? I assume there was never a time when people being dismissed from their jobs were literally put in sacks. I hope not, anyway. So what’s the origin?
Etymology Online says “to give someone the sack” was the original formula and was “perhaps from the notion of the worker going off with his tools in a bag”.
–Mark
The earliest citations in the OED are from the first half of the nineteenth century, but the phrase (lit. “to give someone his bag”) is known in French from the mid-seventeenth century, and in Middle Dutch from before the sixteenth.
It could, as markn+ says, refer to a worker leaving with his toolbag. Or it could refer to, e.g. a domestic servant who lives in, leaving upon dismissal with all their belongings in a bag.
Also, It’s been my experience that using ‘sacked’ to mean fired from a job is a uniquely British English thing. I’ve never heard it in America.
Absolutely. All OED citations from before 1900 are British.
Really? I have, so much so that I didn’t realize it was British in origin. Maybe it’s a regional thing in the U.S.
I’ve also never heard it used by a native US English speaker (lived in Chicago and California). The first time I heard it was in the credits for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and I didn’t understand it. I saw some puzzled looks from other members of the audience too.
The Corpus of Global Web Based English is a great tool for investigating regional usage questions like this. It has a searchable corpus of 1.9 billion words, and breaks down the results by which country they’re from. It shows that the word “sacked” was used 4717 times in Great Britain vs. 852 times in the US. However, scanning the results shows that most of the US uses are in reference to football, while most of the GB references are in the “fired” sense. There are also some instances of the “pillage” sense in both cases. You can do multiword searches with wildcards, but I can’t think of a good search that would clearly distinguish the “fired” sense.
–Mark
Great cite/site.
OP etymology makes me think of the movie and TV trope of “insta-fired==carrying out desk contents in a cardboard box.”
Which I can’t believe happens that often.
“He was boxed.”
Oh yeah, I know several people who worked at companies where that was their standard policy. The same day that someone was fired, they would be required to clean out their desks and leave the building. It happened to my sister once, at the Park Service in Chicago (bizarrely, several days after receiving a very positive review).
–Mark
Noted. That’s cold–making you clean your ex-desk.
I was thinking most people (like me) had post-firing insta-trash which they could fucking clean out themselves.
I don’t hear ‘sacked’ a lot compared, to ‘fired’, ‘canned’, ‘got the axe’, and other terms, but I think any American would know what it means and many have heard it at least once.
It’s not cleaning trash - it’s the pictures of your family and any other personal stuff that are in the box.
Yeah, it’s not the cleaning the desk part that company is interested in, it’s getting the person out of the building as quickly as possible. They don’t want an angry disgruntled ex-employee wandering around the halls, or worse, making some final “improvements” to the company property, computer system, etc. The “clean your desk out” request is just telling them to take any personal items they don’t want to lose forever, since they won’t be returning to the building.
–Mark
Cleaning out your desk means taking your personal property home, not actually cleaning.
In a sales environment, it’s the norm to be asked to pack up your personal belongings after being fired. Usually with a manager there watching you pack up. Don’t want you carrying out customer lists or confidential files.
No, it’s very commonly used in Australia, too.
It’s very common in IT to be escorted out of the building now. They don’t want you taking proprietary data or code or to be screwing up anything in the system. Where I work even though we don’t have many firings even when people leave amicably they are scrubbed out of the system quickly, all passwords de-activated, even contact information removed immediately. It’s all part of the modern paranoia.
Meaning we put on a boxing glove and punched him in the face on the way out the door? 
Seriously, thought, that more or less happened to me when I was let go from an office manager job in the early 90s, though I was allowed to come in after office hours to do it (I was on vacation when my boss called and asked me to “meet him for coffee”). He said I could come back after 5:00 when the office closed to clean out my desk so I wouldn’t have to face the office staff who worked for me. But word got around, and they liked me enough that most of them stayed after hours to be able to say goodbye.
Not a problem. When I was in sales, I had all that on my home computer already. 
How does getting fired “sack” relate to sacking a city in war, or a quarterback sack in football?