Swine

How to spell swine

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce swine

What does swine mean?

1. nounA pig or pigs, especially as farm animals.
2. nounA person regarded as greedy, coarse, or thoroughly unpleasant.

Swine in a sentence

• The farmer raised swine alongside his dairy cattle.

• The landlord was a greedy swine who ignored every repair request.

• Disease can spread quickly through a herd of swine.

• Only a swine would steal a charity collection box.

Where does swine come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Swine is a thoroughly native word, descending directly from the Old English swin, which simply meant a pig. That came from the Proto-Germanic root swinan, and the same ancestor gives modern German Schwein and Dutch zwijn, so the family resemblance across the Germanic languages is very clear. Further back the root is tied to the ancient Indo-European word for the animal that also produced the Latin sus and the Greek hys, both meaning pig, which is why the scientific word 'swine' has such venerable relatives. For centuries swine served as the ordinary English name for the animal, until 'pig' gradually took over in everyday speech and 'swine' settled into more formal, farming, or insulting use. The spelling is straightforward once you remember it follows the same pattern as 'wine' and 'shine', with a long i sound spelled with a silent final e.

How the word is built

• swine (single native root from Old English swin: pig); the word is unchanged in the plural