A smug and self-satisfied pig in its sty
23 February 2022
(28 February: updated with mention of Heywood’s wordplay)
Pig apparently comes from the Old English *pigga. The asterisk indicates that the Old English word is not found in the extant corpus but is thought to have existed. The evidence for its existence is from an entry in the Antwerp glossary, an eleventh-century Latin-Old English glossary that is written in the margins of a copy of Donatus’s Ars maior, a Latin grammar. The manuscript, Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum, MS 16.2, was once bound with London, British Library, MS Add. 32246, and together they are commonly referred to as the Antwerp-London Glossaries. The relevant line in the Antwerp glossary reads:
Glanx glandis picbred.
Glans is Latin for an acorn or a similar nut, so picbred would be an acorn, or literally pig-bread. Pig also appears in some late-Old English/early Middle English surnames and placenames, such as Aluricus Piga (1066), Wulfric Pig (c.1133), Johannis Pig (1186), Jordanus Pigman (1190), Ricardus Pyg (1268), and Pyggeuorde (1296; Pickford, Sussex), giving further evidence to the word’s early existence.
Detail of the marginal gloss in the Antwerp Glossary that contains the line “Glanx glandis picbred”
The usual Germanic word for the animal is a variation on swine, and pig seems to be isolated to English. The only possible relation is the Dutch big, meaning piglet, but in borrowing between English and Dutch the <p> sound is usually preserved; we don’t expect it to change to <b>. Still some sort of relationship is more likely than the two words arising coincidentally, but we don’t know how they might be related.
Pig starts appearing with any frequency in the written record starting in the mid thirteenth century. One of the earliest appearances of the word is in one version of the Ancren Riwle (a.k.a. Ancrene Wisse), a manual of sorts for anchoresses, nuns who enclosed themselves, becoming hermits:
Þe Suwe of giuernesse; þet is, Glutunie, haueð pigges þus inemned. To Erliche hette þet on; þet oðer to Estliche; þet þridde to Urechliche; þet feorðe hette to Muchel; þet fifte to Ofte; ine durnche, more þen ine mete. Þus beoð þeos pigges iueruwed. Ich specke scheortliche of ham; uor ich nam nout ofdred, mine leoue sustren, þet ge ham ueden.
(The sow of greed, that is Gluttony, has pigs thusly named: the first is called Too Early; the second Too Delicious; the third Too Voracious; the fourth is named Too Much; the fifth Too Often, in drink more than in food. Thus are these pigs farrowed. I speak of them briefly, for I am not afraid, my dear sisters, that you feed them.)
In early uses like this one, pig is used to refer to the young of the animal, to a piglet. This is a rather common pattern in terms for animals, starting out as terms for the young, and over time generalizing to include all ages. This passage also shows that pigs have been associated with greed and gluttony for a very long time.
The sense of pig meaning a greedy or otherwise unattractive person dates to the sixteenth century. The following is from a collection of proverbs assembled by John Heywood in 1546. The lines in question are a brief exchange between a woman and a man:
What byd me welcom pyg. I pray the kys me.
Nay farewell sow (quoth he) our lorde blys me
From bassyng of beasts of bear bynder lane.(What, bid me welcome, pig. I pray you kiss me.
No, farewell sow (said he). Our Lord bless me
From the baying of the beasts of Bearbinder Lane.)
These lines are especially interesting as in the sixteenth century pig was also a term of endearment, a clipping of pigsney (pig’s eye). Heywood is engaging in wordplay with the two meanings.
The idea of an odious person being a pig eventually extended to using pig to refer to police officers. Today we often associate this use with the slang of the 1960s counterculture, but it’s much older. It dates to at least the early nineteenth century and the formation of the first organized police forces. It appears in the Lexicon Balatronicum, a slang dictionary from 1811:
Pig. A police officer. A China street pig; a Bow-street officer. Floor the pig and bolt; knock down the officer and run away.
These uses of pig to refer to people are unfair to the animal.
Sources:
Heywood, John A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1546, sig I.3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Lexicon Balatronicum. London: C. Chappel, 1811, s.v. pig. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins...and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 183–86.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. pigge, n.
Morton, James. The Ancren Riwle. The Camden Society 57. London: J.B. Nichols, 1853, 204. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.14.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. pig, n.1, pigsney, n.
Porter, David W. The Antwerp-London Glossaries, vol. 1 of 2. Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 8. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2011, 26. Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus 16.2, fol. 12r.
Photo credits: Pig: Steven Lek, 2006, Plantin-Moretus Museum, public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.