Pork

How to spell pork

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pork

What does pork mean?

1. nounThe meat of a pig, used as food.

Pork in a sentence

• The recipe calls for slow-roasted pork with apple sauce.

• The butcher trimmed the fat from a shoulder of pork.

Where does pork come from?

Language of origin: French

Pork came into English in the 1200s from the Old French word porc, which simply meant a pig or its flesh, and that word in turn descended from the Latin porcus, the everyday Roman name for a domestic pig. The arrival of porc alongside the native English swine is a famous example of the Norman influence on the language after 1066: the living animal kept its Anglo-Saxon name (swine, pig), while the meat served at table took the French-derived word, a pattern repeated with cow and beef, sheep and mutton, deer and venison. Over time the spelling settled into the short, blunt form pork, with the Latin -cus softening through French into a simple hard k sound. The same porcus root survives in relatives such as porcupine (literally a spiny pig) and porcine, meaning pig-like. For spelling, the word is mercifully phonetic, with no silent letters or doubled consonants to trip an adult writer.

How the word is built

• pork (from Old French porc, from Latin porcus: pig)