porcaio

Forms

porcaio m (plural porcai)^[1] Old forms include Old Italian porcaro, Old Italian porcaru, Old Italian porchaio and Old Italian purcaru.^[2] Porcaro is still the regional variant, and the feminine is porcaia.^[3][4][1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Late Latin porcārius (“swineherd”), from Latin porcus (“pig”).^[5][6][2][1] DEI cites the Late Latin noun from Firmicus, and Devoto–Oli gives the source as *porcarium.^[7][8] In Latin porcārius was first an adjective, “concerned with breeding or selling pigs”, formed from the noun with -ārius.^[9][1] The same word is Romanian porcar, Friulian porkar, French porcher, Old Occitan porquier, Catalan porquer, Spanish porquero and Portuguese porqueiro.^[10][11]

The Latin noun goes back to Proto-Italic *porkos and Proto-Indo-European *pórḱos, “young pig”; it is related to Old English fearh (“piglet”) and Lithuanian paršas (“pig”).^[12][1] De Vaan takes the original meaning to have been “digger”, from the root of the word for “furrow”.^[12]

The sense “filthy place”, recorded only from 1871, is treated by DEI, GRADIT, Zingarelli, Treccani and Sabatini–Coletti as a fresh formation from porco with the suffix -aio, and they give it a headword of its own.^{[7][6][13][4][3]}

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is a document from Prato of 1285–1286, where the word means a man who breeds and keeps pigs.^[2][5]

Semantic evolution

In the 14th century the word appears in the Italian translation of Crescenzi, and a diminutive porcaiuolo is found in the statutes of Lizzano.^[7] GRADIT adds the sense of a pig dealer.^[6]

The sense of a filthy, messy place is first recorded in Tommaseo–Bellini's dictionary in 1871.^[5][14] From it came the figurative sense of a corrupt or immoral place or situation.^[6][3][4] In medicine the malattia dei porcai is a mild form of leptospirosis that affects mainly the meninges and is found among pig farmers.^[4]

Timeline

• 1285–1286 – The word, for a swineherd, appears in a document from Prato.^[2][5]
• Before 1320 – GRADIT's first date for the swineherd sense.^[6]
• 14th century – The word is used in the Italian translation of Crescenzi.^[7]
• 1871 – Tommaseo–Bellini records the sense “filthy place”.^[5][14]

Meanings

Noun

1. A swineherd, one who keeps pigs; also a pig dealer.^[6][8][15]
2. A very dirty, untidy place; a pigsty: dopo la festa il salotto era un porcaio.^[6][3][4]
3. (figurative) A corrupt, immoral place or situation.^[6][3][13]

Word family

• porcaiolo

Related words

• porco
• porcile
• porcheria
• Latin porcus

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b c d e Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
4. ^ a b c d e Duro, Aldo (ed.) (1986–1994), Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana; online ed. treccani.it/vocabolario (2008 copy)
5. ^ a b c d e Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
6. ^ a b c d e f g h De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
7. ^ a b c d Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 3019
8. ^ a b Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
9. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
11. ^ Körting, Gustav (1907), Lateinisch-romanisches Wörterbuch: etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Hauptsprachen, 3rd ed., Paderborn: Schöningh
12. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
13. ^ a b Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
14. ^ a b Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
15. ^ Gabrielli, Aldo (2020), Grande dizionario italiano, digital ed., Milano: Hoepli