August 16, 1996

piggyback

Piggy-back? I'll admit to being a city boy, but I don't recall any pictures of pigs used as beasts of burden in National Geographic. Yesterday my daughter (nearly 4 years old) explained what piggy-back meant, and I got to wondering about origins. Could you explain?

I can put some theories out there, but it's probably not possible to give a definitive explanation. One thing seems clear, though: the connection to pigs is accidental.

Piggyback, the main sense of which is '(of something carried, esp. a person) carried on the back or shoulders', dates back to the sixteenth century, but is found in many different forms. The earliest forms vary widely: pickback, a pickback, a pick pack, on pick pack, and pick-a-pack were all in use before 1700. The usual assumption is that the pick word is a dialectal word for 'to throw' that is related to the standard word "pitch." The second element is probably back, in reference to where the burden is carried. It could also be pack, which was the more common form in the seventeenth century. So the compound could refer to "a pack pitched (onto one's back)," or "(a burden) pitched on one's back."

The alteration to piggyback is an illustration of folk etymology. Folk etymology, which we have previously discussed in this space, is the process of altering an uncommon word or element to conform it to one that's better known. Pickback, which had become obscure, was changed in the eighteenth century to pig back; this was in turn changed (perhaps influenced by the pick-a-back form) to the familiar piggyback in the nineteenth century. So while pickback definitely doesn't make any sense, piggyback at least seems as if it could. Since the word had so many variant forms even in its early history, the one thing we can conclude for sure is that people interpreted it in many different ways as soon as it appeared, and this same reanalysis is the source of our current word.