The Reason We Refer to Motorcycles as ‘Hogs’

Motorcycle culture has lent considerable color to everyday vernacular, from referring to spouses as my old lady to being a one-percenter. One of the more enduring colloquialisms is referring to a motorcycle as a hog. “Get on my hog,” one might say. Or, “My hog’s in the shop.” So how did motorcycles and porcine terminology ever intersect?

1. The Origin of Motorcycles as “Hogs”
2. The Hog Legend Continues

The Origin of Motorcycles as “Hogs”

Using hog to describe a method of transportation has actually been around for some time. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, it was in use in print as early as 1888 to describe a massive freight train. “The ‘hog’ will haul nine loaded cars up the heavy Alto grade, while the ordinary road engine had a hard tussel [sic] to haul four or five,” observed a Walla Walla Union article that year.

But that earlier use of the slang may have had relatively little to do with what came next. In the early 1900s, motorcycle manufacturer Harley Davidson assembled and sponsored a factory race team. All around the country, motorcyclists would head for tracks and zip along for hundreds of miles at a stretch.

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In 1916, the Harley team added Ray Weishaar, a standout racer dubbed the “Kansas Cyclone” who had already won a 100-mile race in Kansas and had conquered another even though his handlebars had snapped off during the competition.

In 1920, Weishaar was in Marion, Indiana, for the Marion International Road Race, then considered the largest in the country. Accounts differ slightly on what happened next. Either Weishaar went looking for a piglet to keep as a pet just as he got into town, or he was gifted one by a farmer after winning the race. Either way, Weishaar kept the piglet, which was quickly adopted by the entire racing team as their mascot.

“A little black harness was bought for the pig and he was installed as the official mascot at the end of a light chain and fed out of a bottle and given a bath regularly every other day,” wrote the Leader-Tribune, which also noted the pig liked eating crickets in “its spare time.”

Weishaar was fond of taking the piglet in his arms for victory laps on his bike. This apparently led to the Harley racers becoming known as “the hog boys.” That, in turn, gave way to Harley motorcycles being dubbed “hogs.” (The little piglet’s name was either Billy Ray or Johnny. That, or Weishaar had more than one.)

While contemporary sources play up the piglet’s role in the hog moniker, it’s hard to find print mentions of either motorcycle “hogs” or “hog boys” in the decades that followed. It’s entirely possible the slang was relegated to motorcycle culture of the era rather than the media at large.

Instead, “hog” as a synonym for motorcycle didn’t see its first print use until 1965, when The Saturday Evening Post explained to its docile readership that “a motorcycle is a hog.” It may have gotten a further boost in Hunter S. Thompson’s 1966 non-fiction account of outlaw biker culture, Hell’s Angels, which noted that “In the argot of the cycle world the Harley is a ‘hog,’ and the outlaw bike is a ‘chopped hog.’”

Interestingly, use of hog ticked up in the 1960s for other vehicles, too. The U.S. military used it to refer to aircraft. (“The Hog'’s cruising speed [was] 450 knots.”) It was also used to invoke a Cadillac automobile in the 1960s, an idiom that the OED traces to the Black community. (“Yeah, I got a Hog…a Cadillac.”)

The Hog Legend Continues

While all hogs were motorcycles in the biking world, not all motorcycles were hogs. Early on, a hog referred exclusively to Harleys. Now, it can apply to any type of motorcycle. Hog was also invoked to mean a particularly large bike, but that usage seems to have loosened, as well.

Hog became so ubiquitous with Harleys—and bikes in general—that in 1983 Harley Davidson established the Harley Owners Group, or HOG, as its official bike enthusiast organization. In 1999, the company even tried to trademark hog, but the attempt was struck down—the term was too generic at that point to be the exclusive purview of Harley. (HOG as a group entity, however, was and is a trademark.)

The city of Marion is so proud of its position as the birthplace of the slang term that it regularly hosts the Home of the Hog, a commemorative bike race. And those who would like to invest in Harley as a business proposition can find them on the stock ticker as—what else—HOG.