Hog

How to spell hog

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hog

What does hog mean?

1. nounA domestic pig, especially one raised for its meat.
2. verbTo take or use more than one's fair share of something.

Hog in a sentence

• noun

  The farmer fattened each hog on a diet of grain and scraps.

• verb

  He tends to hog the conversation at every meeting.

• noun

  The prize hog at the county fair weighed nearly three hundred pounds.

• verb

  Please do not hog all the blankets again tonight.

Where does hog come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hog comes from the Old English 'hogg' or 'hocg', a word for a domestic pig, and it is one of those compact native English words whose deeper origin is genuinely murky. Some scholars have proposed a Celtic source, linking it to a root meaning roughly 'the young pig' or even 'the castrated animal', though the evidence is thin and the connection remains disputed. For centuries the word carried a fairly technical farming sense, referring specifically to a young pig reared for slaughter rather than to any pig at all. Over time it broadened into a general term for swine and then, by extension, into a verb describing a greedy person who grabs more than a fair share, much as a pig crowds the feeding trough. The spelling has stayed mercifully simple and phonetic, which is why the word is far easier to write than to trace.

How the word is built

• hog (a single, unanalysable Old English root; no prefix or suffix)