sandhog

Sandhogs – the last shovel gang – who worked on the Cascade Tunnel, a railroad tunnel near Seattle, Washington, USA, photographed on December 8, 1928.

From sand +‎ hog, perhaps alluding to a hog (“animal of the Suidae family, especially a boar, pig, or warthog”) digging in sand.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈsændhɒɡ/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈsændhɔɡ/

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• Hyphenation: sand‧hog

sandhog (plural sandhogs)

1. (US, slang, also figuratively) A person employed to dig tunnels, or (more generally) to work underground or under water.

   Synonym: sandhogger

   • 1975, E.L. Doctorow, chapter XIII, in Ragtime, page 77:

     Sandhogs working behind a hydraulic shield excavated the riverbed silt inch by inch and installed linking sections of cast-iron tubes as they went. The digging chamber was filled with compressed air pumped in from the surface. The work was dangerous. The men who did the work, the sandhogs, were considered heroes.

• sand hog
• sand-hog

sandhog (third-person singular simple present sandhogs, present participle sandhogging, simple past and past participle sandhogged)

1. (intransitive, US, slang) To work at digging tunnels, or (more generally) underground or under water.

• sandhogging (noun)

• sandhog on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “sand-hog, n.” under “sand, n.²”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1909.
• “sandhog, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

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