pigging

Pluralpiggings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of pig.

   He was pigging out at the buffet, piling his plate higher with every trip.

   Pigging out the night before a race left her sluggish and slow.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every verb sense of pig at once: giving birth, eating greedily, huddling together, living in squalor, and clearing a pipeline. Only the pipeline sense takes an object (crews are pigging the line), while the eating and huddling senses stand alone. When the word names the maintenance routine itself, it has become the engineering noun, which, unlike a gerund, can take a plural.

2. 2
   adjective

   Used as a mild intensive to express annoyance, carrying much the same force as 'damned'.

   The pigging boiler has broken down for the third time this winter.

   She wrestled with the pigging gate latch until her hands were sore.

   Similarblasted, flipping, blooming, darned

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The cleaning of a pipeline by driving a device called a pig through its interior.

   Operators scheduled pigging to clear deposits from the long-distance gas line.

   Routine pigging removed years of sediment from the water main.

   Note

   A pipeline engineer's word that is countable when it means individual runs. The American Gas Association's Proceedings of 1955 compare efficiencies "over previous piggings." As a mass noun it names the practice (routine pigging). As a count noun it means each separate pass of the device through the line. The device is the pig, and the verb is to pig a line.

4. 4
   noundialectal

   Alternative form of piggin. Dialectal.

   The dairymaid set the pigging down beside the churn and wiped her hands.

   An old pigging hung from a nail by the kitchen door, its staves worn smooth.

   Note

   A spelling of piggin, the dialect word for a small pail with one stave left long for a handle. It is a separate word from the pig of the other senses. Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia (1823) uses it for the vessels holding a meager breakfast's thin small beer, "in wooden piggings." In older prose, read it as a pail.

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