porcupine [LME] An early form of porcupine was porke despyne, which possibly came from Latin porcus spinosus ‘prickly pig’. The word appeared in many forms between the 15th and 17th centuries, including portepyn, porkpen, porkenpick, and porpoynt. Shakespeare knew the animal as a porpentine and it appears in this form in his plays, often as the name of an inn. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells Hamlet that his story could make his son’s hairs ‘stand on end, / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine’.