A hogshead is a liquid measure that varies in capacity depending on what is being measured. Thus, a hogshead of wine is 63 gallons, of beer 54 gallons, of ale 48 gallons, of molasses 100 gallons, of claret 46 gallons, of port 57 gallons, of sherry 54 gallons, and of Madeira 46 gallons. These varying capacities might seem to reflect the spectrum of sizes to which our tasty, porcine friend\u2014the hog\u2014may grow, but no one actually knows why this liquid measure was named after a hog’s head. The name of the measure originated in England at the end of the fourteenth century, and from there was adopted into a host of other European languages. In some of those languages, though, the hogs part of the word was mistaken for the word ox, and thus Dutch ended up with oxhooft, German with oxhoft, and Danish with oxehoved.<\/p>\n
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A hogshead is a liquid measure that varies in capacity depending on what is being measured. Thus, a hogshead of wine is 63 gallons, of beer 54 gallons, of ale 48 gallons, of molasses 100 gallons, of claret 46 gallons, of port 57 gallons, of sherry 54 gallons, and of Madeira 46 gallons. These varying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-h"],"yoast_head":"\n