Piggy-backed (pickaback) is riding on the back of something else. To piggy-back (or to take a piggyback ride) is to ride on someone's back or shoulders or head.
Contents |
Piggyback was started in the sixteenth century as pick pack. This meant to carry something on the back or shoulders, pick being the medieval version of pitch. Shortly thereafter pickpack meant a ride on somebody’s shoulders. The phrase was changed to piggy in the 19th century because pick had lost its original meaning. Its first appearance in literature was 1838 in Britain and the 1860s in North American.[1]
One common variant of the piggyback involves the carried person sitting on the carrier's shoulders with a leg on each side of the carrier's neck and dangling downwards.
Alternatively the carried person is positioned lower laterally along the carrier's back, legs extending forward around the carrier's waist to provide balance and possibly be supported by the carrier's arms. The latter position requires less physical strength and is safer for both persons, however by being positioned on one's shoulders the carried person's weight is evenly balanced and thus over time is less exhausting.
This expression is used by analogy in several contexts, such as in ophthalmology, electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, structural geology and various transport systems, e.g. rail transport, air transport and intermodal freight transport. An example in air transport was the 1930s British Short Mayo Composite, in which a smaller floatplane aircraft, the four-engined "Mercury", was carried aloft on the back of a larger four-engined flying boat named "Maia"; this enabled the Mercury to achieve a greater range than would have been possible had it taken off under its own power. In space transportation systems a satellite on the top of a launcher assembly is said to be "piggybacked" on the launcher. In electrical engineering a secondary integrated circuit may be piggy-backed onto a primary one e.g. to replace without soldering. If the second chip is mounted leads up, the primary IC is said to be dead-roached instead, since it looks like a dead cockroach with legs up.
The term piggy-back is also used for a product distribution strategy, where two companies that have product lines that complement each other grant access to each other's distribution channel structures so they may both expand their markets (e.g. abroad). This is a variation to the principle of cross selling.
For the purposes of multiple people being stacked onto one piggyback ride, the disambiguation for a single rider is called a "double," for two riders, it is a "triple," and for 3 riders, it is a "quadruple." The operative word that is omitted each time is "stack," because each modifier implies that the action performed is a "double stack, triple stack, or quadruple stack," and so forth.
In rail transport, the practice of carrying trailers, semi-trailers or containers in a train atop a flatcar (intermodal freight transport) is referred to as "piggybacking."[2] [3] (See also Autorack).
It is also possible to carry a railway wagon of one gauge on a flat railway wagon (transporter wagon or rollbock) of another gauge; indeed, whole trains of one gauge can be carried on a train of flat wagons of another gauge as was done temporarily in Australia for a few years from 1955 between Telford and Port Augusta.[4]. It was also temporarely done on the Central Australia Railway while the standard gauge replacement was being built.
Small ships of all kinds can be piggybacked on larger ships.