packed (in) like sardines

Very tightly or snugly packed together, especially in a small space. We didn't want to take more than one car, so we had to drive for about four hours packed like sardines in Jeff's little sedan. Having a concert in our friends café was such a good idea! Sure, we were packed in like sardines, but everyone had a great time.

Fig. packed very tightly. It was terribly crowded there. We were packed in like sardines. The bus was full. The passengers were packed like sardines.

Extremely crowded, as in I could barely breathe-we were packed in like sardines. This term, alluding to how tightly sardines are packed in cans, has been applied to human crowding since the late 1800s.

If a group of people are packed like sardines, they are standing very close together because there is not enough room in an enclosed space. We were packed like sardines in the ship and could barely move. Note: Other words such as crammed, jammed or squashed are sometimes used instead of packed. The male sauna was really packed. There were about five people squashed in there like sardines. Note: The image here is of tinned sardines which have been tightly packed.

Close together, crowded. Canned sardines are jammed together as tightly as practically any such object. The condition was transferred to human crowds by the late nineteenth century. Spike Milligan played with it in his poem “Sardines” (A Book of Milliganimals, 1968): “A baby Sardine saw her first submarine, She was scared and watched through a peephole, ‘O come, come, come, come,’ said the Sardine’s mum, ‘It’s only a tin full of people.’”