pig
/pɪɡ
/
- Sus domesticus, family Suidae (the pig family), descended from the wild boar and domesticated over 8,000 years ago. The pig family also includes the warthog and babirusa.
- Remember to stress that they cannot keep the pot-bellied pig.
- The telling factor could be if the disease gets into pig herds.
Synonyms
- From what scientists can tell, their preferred diet is deer and wild pigs called peccaries.
- Ecologically, they range from forest dwellers, such as wild pigs and chevrotains, to dominant large herbivores on grasslands.
- For example, younger grower pigs have a high rate of bone growth and therefore have a higher calcium and phosphorus requirement.
- Body tissues with the highest rate of formation in younger pigs are bone and muscle.
- The food, which was served, consisted of roast pig, beef slices, as well as roast and mashed potatoes and provided all the energy for a long night's dancing into the early hours.
- Pork and other pig products - ham, bacon, and sausages - are staples of the Castilian diet.
- Maybe I'm a chauvinist pig, but you know, the women in my life have never given me any reason to think otherwise.
- It's in my nature to be a greedy fat-sucking pig.
- Almost down to his last low, although this time round, he had been such a greedy pig.
Synonyms
- He's known for unusual sentences, like the time he ordered a man who called a police officer a pig to spend a couple of hours penned up with the real thing.
- And a man who called a policeman a pig had to stand for two hours with a hog in a pen set up in a town centre.
- All police are pigs because they make the conscious decision to join an organization which is, basically, legal GANGSTERISM.
- In order to make malleable wrought iron, the iron pigs were reheated and forged into red hot iron masses called blooms.
- Lead ore, pig lead, timber and chert stones from Flintshire were the other significant cargoes.
- Depending upon function, different pig designs are used.
- The pig is forced down the pipeline by hydrostatic or pneumatic pressure that is applied behind the pig.
- Any more of this Zen acceptance stuff and I'd sit about all day blissfully pigging out on junk food and getting obese.
- We shared traditional Bulgarian, Russian, and American foods, and pigged out for four hours.
- She rapidly scanned the room to see if she knew anyone and in the corner of the room where she was sitting that morning, she spotted her brother and Alex still pigging out on food.
- In Bolton they pigged it in a wretched artisans' dwelling in Davenport Street. The project was none the less immensely successful.
- So long as they pigged it with him and were willing to share his lot he was not unkind to them, unless he happened by some accident to achieve drunkenness.
- Having no offer of beds, I returned to the schooner, and we pigged it out in the least miserable way we could.
- The other sow pigged, and has raised a lovely litter of 6.
- If their sow pigged or their hens breed chickens, they cannot afford to eat them but must sell them to make their rent.
- If the pipeline is to be cleaned mechanically or "pigged" the pipeline size may dictate the minimum valve bore or the valve configuration.
- The purpose of operational pigging is to obtain and maintain efficiency of the pipeline to be pigged.
- And once you've pigged, or maintenance pigged, the pipeline, then you run a smart pig through there, and a smart pig measures the wall thickness of the pipe so that you can find little weaknesses before they rupture.
Phrases
bleed like a (stuck) pig
in pig
in a pig's eye
make a pig of oneself
make a pig's ear of
on the pig's back
pig in the middle
a pig in a poke
pig in the python
a pig of a ——
pigs might (or can) fly
put lipstick on a pig
squeal (or yell) like a stuck pig
sweat like a pig
Derivatives
piglike
- For the next 80 million years, synapsids evolved into various wolflike and bearlike predators, as well as into an array of peculiar piglike herbivores.
- Too, this unique region also hosts an impressive array of other wildlife, including blacktail prairie dogs, gray foxes, and piglike javelinas.
- The most intriguing thing about him were his small, piglike eyes that were nearly swallowed up by the large brow on his pudgy face.
pigling
- I went down each morning to say my hellos to the pigs and the people: cute little wee black piglings and mighty great boars and snufflers.
Origin
Middle English: probably from the first element of Old English picbrēd 'acorn', literally 'pig bread' (i.e. food for pigs).
The word pig appears in Old English only once, the usual word being swine. In the Middle Ages pig at first meant specifically ‘a young pig’, as it still does in North America. Observations such as pigs might fly had a 17th-century parallel in pigs fly with their tails forward. An early user of the modern form was Lewis Carroll in 1865 in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: ‘ “I've a right to think,” said Alice sharply…“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly.” ’ In a pig in a poke, poke (Middle English) means ‘a small sack or bag’, now found mainly in Scottish English. The British phrase to make a pig's ear out of, ‘to handle ineptly’, probably derives from the proverb you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, recorded from the 16th century. In the children's game pig (or piggy) in the middle, first recorded in the Folk-Lore Journal of 1887, two people throw a ball to each other while a third tries to intercept it. This is behind the use of pig in the middle for a person who is in an awkward situation between two others. Piggyback has been around since the mid 16th century, but the origin of the expression has been lost. Early forms tend to be something like ‘pick-a-pack’ which seems to have been changed by folk etymology to the form we now have. See also hog