swine and pork

say" no no no to little piggy"

Today we look at the tale of the swine and the story of the pork. The words swine and pork don't resemble each other; they entered our lexicon hundreds of years apart, and yet the two words share similar definitions: pork names the "fresh or salted flesh of swine when dressed for food." Swine, of course, names the "omnivorous stout-bodied mammal with a long flexible snout."

The word swine, of Germanic ancestry, has been around as long as English itself. It entered modern English from Middle English, and a version of swine was familiar to speakers of Old English.

Then there's pork, which entered English from French in the 14th century. French is a Romance language, a language that developed from Latin. So if English speakers had been raising swine and consuming its flesh for a few hundred years, why, in the 14th century, did they begin using the term pork? As one word lover pointed out, it wasn't as if some 14th century peasant woke up one morning and picked out a Latin-based word to join the lexicon.

In fact, we can thank—or blame—the Norman invaders for the advent of pork. One result of the 11th century Normandy invasion was that French speakers became the ruling upper class. While the lower classes raised the swine, those to the manner born were served, at their request, pork.