Piggyback

Mutantoe 2 According to Word Wide Words the expression is a misspell of pick-pack which happened in the 19th century: It started out in the sixteenth century as pick pack, carrying something on the back or shoulders.

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After that, matters began to get muddled. Pack was changed into back through the obvious associations. Then it became pick-a-back.

Finally, the pigs came along, in the nineteenth century, by a confusion between pick and pig , an obvious-enough change, not least because pick made no more sense to people in the word in those days than it does today. Piggy-back came along later in the century, with piggyback a modern loss of the hyphen.

The meaning and origin of the expression: Piggyback

I don't recall pick-pack in this context or anywhere else, come to that , but even my grandmother used to say pick-a-back - so it's old , but not exactly medieval. I wonder if there really was anything special about how farmers in Ireland carried their pigs in the nineteenth century, as opposed to how English farmers would have carried theirs.

Chenmunka 12k 10 36 Well, there isn't one - because 'piggyback' has nothing to do with pigs. In the 20th century, we settled on the 'piggyback' spelling, but the term has existed in myriad forms over the years - ' a pick-apack ', ' pick-a-back ', ' pig-aback ' and so on.

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The earliest forms of 'piggyback' were the medieval 'pick back' and 'pick pack'. These are cited within a year of each other in the s, both in essays on religious themes:.

John Rastell's A confutation of a sermon pronounced by Mr. Juell , - "What a tale is this, that the oblation of the church should be borne vpon an Angell on pick pack perchaunce.

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The common 'pick' part of these derives from 'pitching', either in the sense of 'placing', as in pitching a tent or 'throwing', as with a pitchfork. Timber wagon on rollbocks. Retrieved 24 October Harding, Lothian Publishing Co. A Great Leap Forward: Retrieved from " https: Transport operations Intermodal transport.

etymology - Origin of "piggyback?" - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

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