swine
/swʌɪn
/- Because of changes in the pork industry, which have occurred over the years, the prevalence of infection in swine and humans has declined dramatically in the U. S.
- The virus explosively increased among domesticated swine.
- These arrogant swine actually think it is their RIGHT to decide what the public will be allowed to know!
- Well, they can all give me money, but no one does, the tight swine.
- All the same, it does feel very nice when one comes across a great artist who is not an utter swine politically.
- Its string of bitsy and complicated mosaics makes it a swine to maintain rhythmic cohesion.
- You are no doubt aware that grass is a swine to get out of cloth.
- The initial ascent is deceptively steep: to be completely honest, it is a swine to climb.
Derivatives
swinish
- This is the language of the tavern, sir, low and swinish.
- Standing in the way of elementary fairness was the propertied class, and its terror of what he called the swinish multitude.
- Unlike his dull, swinish, and conventional brother, Claudius comes across as a cosmopolitan, knight-like figure.
swinishly
- Meal done, the peasant is very soon snoring swinishly in his bed.
- A lot of people today live swinishly, gratifying their own desires, and then they wonder why they're so miserable.
- You do not want to become wealthy in order to live swinishly, for the gratification of animal desires; that is not life.
swinishness
- He merely acknowledged, with his trademark fusion of cynicism and swinishness, what most people already know.
- The implication always being that swinishness is intrinsic to the artistic personality, and indeed that the greater the artistic genius, the greater the swinishness.
- This is what you run into: this swinishness - it's only opinion.
Origin
Old English swīn, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch zwijn and German Schwein, also to sow2.
pig from Old English:
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