Meaning
A selfish or reckless road user who hogs the road - taking up more than a fair share of it, blocking others from overtaking, or swaggering through traffic without care for anyone else. Originally a label for drivers who refused to share the road with cyclists; now applied chiefly to inconsiderate motor drivers. The metaphor casts the driver as a hog greedily monopolising the trough. Informal and derogatory. The hog metaphor spawns parallel forms - sofa hog, air hog - so the driving sense is the leading instance of a wider pattern of greedy monopolising. Regional use: Earliest evidence American (1887-88); now common in both British and American English.
Origin
Popular memory ties road hog to the automobile age, but the record antedates the car. The OED's factsheet gives earliest evidence for the noun from 1887, in the writing of K. Kron - verified directly - and its hog entry adds an 1888 citation from the New York Times of 25 March: 'Road hogs - every horseman knows there are such creatures.' The term flourished in the American bicycle boom of the late 1880s and 1890s, chiefly branding carriage drivers who would not give a wheelman room to pass, before boomeranging onto reckless cyclists themselves and, in the twentieth century, onto motorists. The OED-dated derivatives - road-hoggism (1894), road hoggishness (1905), road-hogging (1906) - show its vigour across the early motoring era.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hog the road
- road hogs
- roadhog
Usage Examples
- Some road hog in a pickup straddled both lanes for three miles.
- The bus driver flashed his lights at the road hog blocking the outside lane.
- Cyclists cursed the road hog who squeezed them against the kerb.