Author: Emma Ferrett
Date: September 18, 2025
quill pig, n
(also quilly pig)
Canadianism
see PORCUPINE
For my final Q entry, I’m highlighting my personal favourite Canadianism from the Q section: quilly pig. Your friendly neighbourhood porcupine once went by quill pig or quilly pig, especially in Canada in the 1930s to 60s. Though quill pig’s usage has plummeted, it’s important to include obsolete and rare words in our dictionary so that we have a comprehensive list of historical words from at least the last 100 years. I also believe that quilly pig needs a renaissance! It’s time for the majestic, clover-eating, armoured relative of the beaver to shine.
With a case like quilly pig, we need not spend much time on a definition. The term means “porcupine”, so we simply cross-reference the entry for porcupine: "a herbivorous quill-bearing rodent in the family Erethizontidae". Where we do spend time is on the tag: Canadianism, which indicates a distinctively Canadian word or phrase. One of the questions we get asked most often at the CED is, how do you know a word is Canadian? Luckily for us, our partners at the The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP), now in its , have already laid out of Canadianisms:
- Type 1 – Origin: a form and its meaning were created in what is now Canada (e.g., renoviction)
- Type 2 – Preservation: a form or meaning that was once widespread in many Englishes, but is now preserved in Canadian English (e.g., reading week)
- Type 3 – Semantic Change: forms that have undergone semantic change in Canadian English (e.g., toque)
- Type 4 – Culturally Significant: forms or meanings that have been enshrined in the Canadian psyche and are widely seen as part of Canadian identity (e.g., eh and elbows up)
- Type 5 – Frequency: forms or meanings that are Canadian by virtue of frequency (e.g., washroom)
- Type 6 – Memorial: forms or meanings now widely considered to be pejorative (e.g., puck bunny)
Nowadays we have electronic corpora and to help us determine a Canadianism from a non-Canadianism. This scope allows lexicographers to include a range of words and meanings reflective of both current usage and historical usage. That way, users picking up a dusty Canadian novel from, say 1925, will still be able to use the CED to find definitions for any word in that book, even if the word has since become obsolete.
One such example is quilly pig, which is rarely used today (despite how much I force it into my everyday conversations). Quilly pig appeared in the very first edition of the DCHP published in 1967. The entry references the tale "Quill Pig Teaches Miss Bobtail a Lesson" from Ralph S. Sherman’s 1924 book Mother Nature Stories, in which the quill pigs boot some pesky humans from quilly pig territory (“...those Quill Pigs were determined to capture that camp, which had been pitched in the dead centre of their salt-lick”). So our friend quilly pig, as a , will be included in the CED. And I will personally include it on my crusade for its reinvigoration in Canadian English!