hog
/hɒɡ
/- The farm, which would breed and fatten up to 150,000 hogs annually for slaughter, would have made the facility one of Alberta's largest hog operations.
- Back in 1997, thousands of hogs were slaughtered in the wake of a large outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease, dealing a serious blow to pork exports and virtually crippling the local hog industry.
Synonyms
- This included eradication of mosquitoes, plus elimination of non-native species such as water hyacinth by flooding with salt water and trapping nutria and feral hogs.
- Feral hogs are often found in the remote, rugged portions of the state's Ozarks mountain range, where thick brush and timber make it hard to locate and kill the animals.
- Researchers in the late 1970s estimated that there were fewer than 150 pygmy hogs living in the wild.
- At a certain lodge in East Africa for example, a little girl was seen leaning out of a window, trying to touch a giant forest hog, a large wild pig the size of a donkey, with a reputation of ripping hunters and their dogs with fearsome tusks.
- Corporate data centers are power hogs, and their gluttony gets worse every year.
- Worse, they're also tremendous space hogs, gobbling up dozens of precious square feet in useless aisle area.
- Apparently, it's also very "in" to refer to your bike as a "hog".
- The bikes are located at the front of the store, with memorabilia such as souvenirs, pictures, Harley chrome plates, and bike ornaments surrounding the hogs.
- Firstly, we shall be selling in the sheep shed with a full live auction of hoggs, ewes and spring lambs, if there are any about.
- We are selling about 200 cattle each week and just short of 2,000 hoggs and lambs which is a good indicator of the demand.
- Others will selfishly hog a space all day and not give fellow drivers a fair chance to park conveniently.
- However, it is in his present status as autodriver that he hogs the limelight.
- And that seems to have to do with this knack the brothers picked up of hogging the limelight even as school kids… though at times it meant being hauled up for mischief in front of the school assembly.
Synonyms
Phrases
go the whole hog
live high on (or off) the hog
Derivatives
hogger
- Your report about middle lane hoggers being a major cause of motorway jams and tailbacks must have had your Motoring Correspondent seething.
- When I wasn't bristling at the inconsiderate path hoggers and marvelling at the elderly men overtaking me, I was snapping some more photos.
- Oh you know how these papers are taken by the general public, in this case my fellow hoggers!
hoggery
- The cloned swine was born on July 16 at a hoggery in Nanhui, Shanghai.
- There are some hoggeries in England which keep pigs.
- Anti-mosquito operations around hoggeries and at sites where migratory birds gather will be stepped up, particularly during the rainy season.
hoggish
/ adjective ...- You see- ‘This was soon cut short by hoggish snorts and guffaws, causing the explanation to be abandoned.’
- A bit on the hoggish side, but it gets the job done.
- Trying to estimate quantities of meat is always a nightmare so I allow a pound of meat per person, but then I like long drawn out meals and have never been ashamed of hoggish excess.
hoggishly
- As you've discovered by your cutting back we have been trained to be the most hoggishly wasteful society in history.
- When I board I see a hoggishly obese woman of indeterminate age, wearing an olive-drab, good-quality wool coat, a velvet skirt and a chartreuse and crimson sweater.
- I despised anyone who was not describable as a ‘gentleman’, but also I hated the hoggishly rich, especially those who had grown rich too recently.
hog-like
- Their scientific name means ‘water hog’ and indeed their bodies are hog-like, but they are rodents.
- But just before she could get any closer a evil, painfully load hog-like cry stopped her.
Origin
Late Old English hogg, hocg, perhaps of Celtic origin and related to Welsh hwch and Cornish hoch 'pig, sow'.
This may be one of the small number of English words that comes from the language of the Celts, who lived in Britain before the Romans and Saxons. It is probably related to Welsh hwch and Cornish hoch ‘pig, sow’. A number of explanations have been offered for the expression to go the whole hog, which was first used in the USA in the early 19th century. The earliest examples are in political contexts, so its origins may lie in the large political rallies which were then common. At these rallies various ploys were used to woo potential voters, notably the provision of vast quantities of free food: a whole pig —or hog, in American English—might be roasted. Another idea is that the phrase comes from a fable about Muslims in The Love of the World: Hypocrisy Detected, published in 1779 and composed by William Cowper (an English poet and hardly an expert on Islam). According to this fable certain Muslims, forbidden to eat pork by their religion but strongly tempted to have just a little, suggested that Muhammad had meant to ban only one particular part of the pig. But they could not agree which part that was, and between them they ate the whole animal, each one telling himself that his own portion did not contain the part that was forbidden. To live high on the hog is to have a luxurious lifestyle. The phrase probably comes from the idea of eating the best bits of a pig, which were higher up on the animal, as opposed to the offal and trotters. The verb use, ‘to take all of something in a greedy way’, comes from the proverbial greed of the pig. It was first used in the USA, in the 1880s.