guinea pig
44
3.5
- noun
- /ˈɡɪni pɪɡ/
- Informal
:
conejillo de Indias
- Don't you realize you're being used as guinea pigs for Big Pharma?
- used as guinea pigs
- treated as guinea pigs
Maybe they're waiting to see how things pan out in the USA, the Guinea pig of countries.
- Maybe they're waiting to see how things pan out in the USA, the Guinea pig of countries.
- And, And so vicariously through my students, I was like experimenting, like they're my Guinea pigs on these ideas for managing fear and understanding fear.
- You know, what matters is you use people as human Guinea pigs.
- So I will be the Winnie pig, Guinea pig, Guinea pig, Guinea pig.
- So we both often feel at a lot of cases like the Guinea pigs, I think because we're referred to as technically quote UN quote OG Youtubers.
- So we in a, in a, in a, in a way we're becoming a Guinea pig in the solution of conflicts.
Examples
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I had offered myself as a guinea pig for certain tests involving glands and connective tissue.
Fiction book (1992) -
Thank you for being my guinea pig.
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So thank you for being the the first Guinea pig, so to speak.
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We need a guinea pig.
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I am through being your guinea pig.
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Who wants to be the first guinea pig?
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So I want to thank you for being the Guinea pigs of this course.
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And I can think of no better guinea pigs than you.
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So I volunteered to be a Guinea pig for motion sickness research.
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I volunteered to be a guinea pig for the new medical trial to see how the treatment works.
Synonyms
427
4.1
A thing that someone looks at or studies
18
6.1
A person used by others for tests who often feels watched or controlled
Surface Forms
Morphology
guinea + pig
The literal words 'guinea' and 'pig' denote an animal, and the MWE is a metaphorical extension from animals commonly used in experiments to a person used as a test subject. This motivated, cross-linguistically attested metaphor makes the connection partially predictable for learners who know the constituents, but the specific human-as-test-subject sense is not fully derivable without prior exposure.
Etymology
Guinea pig for 'a person who is used as a subject in an experiment' comes from the animal's long use in scientific tests. Because doctors and scientists tried medicines on actual guinea pigs, people began to call human test subjects 'guinea pigs'—that is, 'someone used in an experiment'.