Word.ws English Dictionary

spine pig

spine pig noun: porcupine.

Noun

spine pig (plural spine pigs)

  1. Porcupine.
    • Hares are fairly common, so also is the fretful porcupine, who, if he finds his way into your kitchen-garden, will play havoc with your pet vegetables. He is accounted delicate eating, this 'spine pig,' as the natives call him; [...]1884, James Hogg, Florence Marryat, London society
    • "Spine-swine (the edgehog misnamed hedgehog)," echidna, echinoderm, rhino, the spine pig or porcupine — "everything is battle-dressed"; [...]1953, Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the age

Forms of spine pig

pluralspine pigs

Origin of spine pig

From spine + pig, literal translation of porcupine.

Questions about spine pig

What does spine pig mean?
Spine pig means porcupine.
What part of speech is spine pig?
Spine pig is a noun.
What is the plural of spine pig?
The plural of spine pig is spine pigs.

Words near spine pig in the dictionary

  1. spindrifts
  2. spine
  3. spine board
  4. spine boards
  5. spine chilling
  6. spine pig
  7. spine pigs
  8. spine plot
  9. spine plots
  10. spine ramp
  11. spine ramps

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spine pig (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “spine pig.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/spine_pig. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.