swine
/swaɪn/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.46 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A pig, an animal of family Suidae, especially in agricultural contexts.
name
A small village and civil parish in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England (OS grid ref TA1335).
Example Sentences
- "The Zimmermann farm raises swine for their meat."
- "Nah, I ain't Jewish. I just don't dig on swine, that's all."
- "The Book says don't eat no swine."
- "Thousands of workers and students screaming "Get out of town, you Nazi swine!" stormed a police barricade here today in an attempt to silence Adolf von Thadden, head of the right-wing National Democratic party."
- "Their captain's a swine, an evil bastard. Name of Cavendish."
- "Don't cast pearls before swine."
Etymology
From Middle English swyn, swin; from Old English swīn; from Proto-West Germanic *swīn; from Proto-Germanic *swīną; from an adjectival form of Proto-Indo-European *suH- (“pig”). * In modern use, especially as a term of abuse, frequently a calque of German Schwein or its derivatives. * In reference to wolffish, a clipping of swinefish. Cognates Related to West Frisian swyn, Low German Swien, Dutch zwijn, German Schwein, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish svin, Faroese and Icelandic svín, and more distantly to Polish świnia, Russian свинья́ (svinʹjá), Latin sūinus, Latin sūs, Ancient Greek ὗς (hûs), Persian خوک (xuk).