hog

[hawg, hog] /hɔg, hɒg/
noun
1.
a hoofed mammal of the family Suidae, order Artiodactyla, comprising boars and swine.
2.
a domesticated swine weighing 120 pounds (54 kg) or more, raised for market.
3.
a selfish, gluttonous, or filthy person.
4.
Slang.
  1. a large, heavy motorcycle.
  2. an impressively large luxury automobile.
5.
Also, hogg, hogget. British.
  1. a sheep about one year old that has not been shorn.
  2. the wool shorn from such a sheep.
  3. any of several other domestic animals, as a bullock, that are one year old.
6.
Railroads Slang. a locomotive.
7.
a machine for shredding wood.
8.
Curling. a stone that stops before reaching the hog score.
verb (used with object), hogged, hogging.
9.
to appropriate selfishly; take more than one's share of.
10.
to arch (the back) upward like that of a hog.
11.
roach3 (def 3).
12.
(in machine-shop practice) to cut deeply into (a metal bar or slab) to reduce it to a shape suitable for final machining.
13.
to shred (a piece of wood).
verb (used without object), hogged, hogging.
14.
Nautical. (of a hull) to have less than the proper amount of sheer because of structural weakness; arch.
Compare sag (def 6a).
Idioms
15.
go the whole hog, to proceed or indulge completely and unreservedly:
We went the whole hog and took a cruise around the world.
Also, go whole hog.
16.
live high off / on the hog, to be in prosperous circumstances.
Also, eat high off the hog.
Origin
1300-50; Middle English; compare Old English hogg- in place-names; perhaps < Celtic; compare Welsh hwch, Cornish hogh swine
Related forms
hoglike, adjective
unhogged, adjective
Examples from the web for hog
  • It is not the time of your life to be living higher on the hog than you can afford.
  • The bank bail-outs hog attention, but many of the government's crisis measures were designed to prop up the shadow system.
  • To be fair, having them feathered would be a huge resource hog.
  • He cites the pork industry, which used to be blighted with hog cholera.
  • He also loves working with and training his hog hunting dogs.
  • In the suddenly zooming story of electric cars, it's the cars themselves that have tended to hog the spotlight.
  • Shooting feral pigs from helicopters won't work, but some rational steps should be taken to help control the wild hog population.
  • But when they do, physics and biology-those aristocrats of science-will no longer hog the headlines.
  • My husband found her and her parents in a hog shed and convinced the owners to give them up.
  • If you're going to go see it, you might as well go whole hog.
British Dictionary definitions for hog

hog

/hɒɡ/
noun
1.
a domesticated pig, esp a castrated male weighing more than 102 kg
2.
(US & Canadian) any artiodactyl mammal of the family Suidae; pig
3.
(Brit, dialect, Austral & NZ) Also hogg another name for hogget
4.
(informal) a selfish, greedy, or slovenly person
5.
(nautical) a stiff brush, for scraping a vessel's bottom
6.
(nautical) the amount or extent to which a vessel is hogged Compare sag (sense 6)
7.
another word for camber (sense 4)
8.
(slang, mainly US) a large powerful motorcycle
9.
(informal) go the whole hog, to do something thoroughly or unreservedly: if you are redecorating one room, why not go the whole hog and paint the entire house?
10.
(informal, mainly US) live high on the hog, live high off the hog, to have an extravagant lifestyle
verb (transitive) hogs, hogging, hogged
11.
(slang) to take more than one's share of
12.
to arch (the back) like a hog
13.
to cut (the mane) of (a horse) very short
Derived Forms
hogger, noun
hoglike, adjective
Word Origin
Old English hogg, from Celtic; compare Cornish hoch
Word Origin and History for hog
n.

late 12c. (implied in hogaster), "swine reared for slaughter" (usually about a year old), also used by stockmen for "young sheep" (mid-14c.) and for "horse older than one year," suggesting the original sense had something to do with an age, not a type of animal. Not evidenced in Old English, but it may have existed. Possibility of British Celtic origin {Watkins, etc.] is regarded by OED as "improbable." Figurative sense of "gluttonous person" is first recorded early 15c. Meaning "Harley-Davidson motorcycle" is attested from 1967.

To go hog wild is from 1904. Hog in armor "awkward or clumsy person in ill-fitting attire" is from 1650s. Phrase to go the whole hog (1828) is sometimes said to be from the butcher shop option of buying the whole slaughtered animal (at a discount) rather than just the choice bits. But it is perhaps rather from the story (recorded in English from 1779) of Muslim sophists, forbidden by the Quran from eating a certain unnamed part of the hog, who debated which part was intended and managed to exempt the whole of it from the prohibition.

v.

"to appropriate greedily," U.S. slang, 1884 (first attested in "Huck Finn"), from hog (n.). Related: Hogged; hogging.

Slang definitions & phrases for hog

hog

noun
  1. A locomotive, originally a heavy freight engine (1915+ Railroad & hoboes)
  2. hogger (1915+ Railroad & hoboes)
  3. A Harley-Davidson2 motorcycle: Harley, perhaps best known for its big-engine ''hogs''/ a hundred Hell's Angels on their Hogs (1960s+ Motorcyclists)
  4. A large car, esp a Cadillac2: ''I got a Hog, a Cadillac'' (1950s+ Black)
  5. (also the hog) PCP or a similar addictive drug: climbed on stage and threw thousands of caps of ''the hog'' into the crowd (1960s+ Narcotics)
  6. A sexually appealing male; Adonis, hunk (1980s+ Students)
verb

To take or eat everything available for oneself; claim and seize all: appeared simultaneously with ET and suffered as the little fungiform geek hogged the box office/ Mara had deliberately hogged the spotlight (1884+)

Related Terms

eat high on the hog, on the hog, whole hog

[railroad and hobo senses fr the fact that large locomotives consumed a great deal of coal]


hog in Technology


1. Favoured term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources, especially those which noticeably degrade interactive response. *Not* used of programs that are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves (see pig, run like a). More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g. "memory hog", "core hog", "hog the processor", "hog the disk". "A controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the bus-hog timer expires."
2. Also said of *people* who use more than their fair share of resources (particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one file system, they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete.

Idioms and Phrases with hog

hog

see: