go the whole hog

The popular story

The tidy version runs through William Cowper. In a satirical poem written around 1779 and printed in his 1782 collection, the gentle English poet imagines Muslims forbidden by their prophet to eat one unnamed part of the pig. Unable to agree on which part is banned, each samples his favourite joint until, between them, they have devoured the entire animal. Cowper’s lines land the joke cleanly: “Thus says the prophet of the Turk, / Good musselman, abstain from pork! … Thus, conscience freed from every clog, / Mahometans eat up the hog.” There, the argument goes, is the ancestor of our idiom: to take the whole hog is to abandon half-measures and swallow the lot.

A second favourite points to the butcher’s block. Customers, the story says, were asked whether they wanted only the prime cuts or would take the whole carcass at a keener price; to ‘go the whole hog’ was to buy all of it. A third, beloved of pub etymologists, turns on money: ‘hog’ was old slang for a shilling, or for a large silver coin stamped with a hog and scored so it could be snapped into change. To spend the uncut coin, rather than break it for small purchases, was to go the whole hog. Each of these tales is self-contained and satisfying, which is precisely why etymologists treat them with suspicion.

What the record shows

The datable facts are narrower and more interesting than any single story. The wording ‘the whole hog’ genuinely predates the idiom, and it genuinely appears in Cowper around 1779. But the phrase in its modern sense, meaning to commit utterly, does not surface until almost half a century later, and it surfaces in America, not England. The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster both date it to 1828, and the earliest newspaper examples cluster in January of that year, in the heat of Andrew Jackson’s run for the presidency. A Connecticut paper reported a politician who had ‘refused to go the whole hog, as the Jacksonites have it’; across New England, zealous Jackson men were being tagged ‘whole hog’ supporters. Within days of these appearances, a Pennsylvania correspondent was already crediting Cowper’s poem, so the literary connection was being drawn at the very birth of the idiom.

The coin and butcher explanations, by contrast, are preserved only in later dictionaries that report them as hearsay. Green’s Dictionary of Slang records the ‘hog as coin’ idea as a nineteenth-century guess; Brewer’s repeats the Irish-shilling version. None rests on a dated citation that shows the phrase being used that way.

The verdict

This is a phrase with two honest dates and no proven parent. ‘The whole hog’ as words is real and old, fixed in Cowper by 1779. ‘Go the whole hog’ as an idiom is real and precisely placed, an Americanism of 1828 carried on the noise of a presidential campaign. What cannot be shown is the causal bridge between them. It is plausible that Cowper’s much-reprinted comic verse supplied a ready image that American writers reached for, and the fact that observers invoked the poem in 1828 strengthens that case. But plausibility is not proof, and the rival coin and butcher theories remain mere conjecture. We rate the whole affair partly true: the attestations are solid, the favourite origin story is credible but unconfirmed, and the folk explanations are unverified.

What we don’t know

We do not know whether a single living speaker in 1828 had Cowper in mind, or whether ‘whole hog’ simply floated up from ordinary talk about pigs and butchers. We do not know if a stray late-1827 newspaper use predates the January 1828 cluster; one secondary source claims a December 1827 example, but it has not been firmly confirmed. We cannot verify the coin story at all, nor the suggestion that the phrase began as Virginia political slang. The honest position is that the idiom’s exact moment of coinage, and the thought behind it, are lost.

How it’s used today

Today the phrase means wholehearted commitment: you decide to do a thing properly and spare nothing. It thrives in everyday speech about renovations, holidays, meals, and ambitions, as in deciding not merely to tidy the garden but to go the whole hog and relandscape it. The older form keeps the definite article; modern American usage often clips it to ‘go whole hog’. Either way, the pig endures as a cheerfully excessive emblem of doing a job all the way to the end. It is a rare idiom that wears its uncertainty lightly: nearly two centuries on, we still cannot say for certain why a hog, of all creatures, came to stand for total commitment, and the phrase is none the worse for it.