Pig
nounA domesticated farm animal kept for its meat, with a stout body, short legs and a flat snout.
How to spell pig
3 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce pig
What does pig mean?
- nounA domesticated farm animal kept for its meat, with a stout body, short legs and a flat snout.
- verbTo eat greedily or to an excessive degree, usually in the phrase 'pig out'.
Pig in a sentence
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noun
The farmer fed every pig in the barn before dawn.
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verb
After the marathon they decided to pig out on pizza.
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noun
A curly tail is one feature of a healthy pig.
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verb
It is tempting to pig out on snacks during a long film.
Where does pig come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The origin of pig is genuinely murky, which is unusual for such an everyday word. It appears in Middle English as 'pigge', meaning a young swine, and it almost certainly descends from an unrecorded Old English form, but no clear ancestor has survived in the written record. For centuries the adult animal was actually called a 'swine' or a 'sow' and 'boar', while 'pig' referred specifically to the youngster, only later broadening to mean the animal at any age. Scholars have linked it tentatively to Low German and Dutch dialect words for the same beast, yet none of these connections is firm enough to settle the matter. Because the word is short, blunt and Germanic in flavour, its spelling has stayed mercifully simple, three letters that say exactly what they sound.
How the word is built
- pig (a single, indivisible Old English root; no prefix or suffix)
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