a wordhog

In Carolina barbecue speech the animal is a hog. Whole hog is the eastern North Carolina and Pee Dee style; a hog killing is the winter work of the farm; a hog's size is its dressed weight. American dictionaries make a hog a domesticated swine of 120 pounds or more raised for market and a pig the younger, smaller animal; the pit's small hogs of 80 to 120 pounds dressed sit at the bottom of that range. The pig pickin' hog is a barrow, a castrated male, or a gilt, a young female — boars and sows are too big.

Hog is older than pig for the grown animal. Old English hogg meant a swine of a certain age — a castrated male, or one reared for slaughter at about a year; pig, until the fourteenth century, meant a young one. Dressed weight is the pit's unit: the weight after the organs, head and inedible parts are removed, about 72 per cent of live weight for a pig by Wikipedia's example. A pig pickin' hog is 80 to 120 pounds dressed; elsewhere hogs run to 300 pounds, but in the Carolinas small hogs cooked hot so the skin crisps and can be chopped in. Hog killing was the farm's winter work: NCpedia describes it beginning on the first frigid day of autumn or winter, neighbours gathering before dawn, as many as 100 hogs penned and fattened on gleaned peas, potatoes and corn, and the weeks after full of spare ribs, liver and sausage, the hams a month or two later. Tradition holds — the barbecue was what a hog killing or a church homecoming did with fresh meat before curing. 'Go the whole hog', American English of 1828, is the same animal as a figure of speech.