It’s British Pie Week. It is therefore only fitting that this week’s interesting word should be related to pie.

A pie-biter is a person who eats or really likes pies. It can also be a greedy person or animal, or a person who accepts political favours (pie is a slang word for political favour or patronage).

Although rare, pie-biter is a colloquial term typically used in the United States or as derogatory slang in Australia (where the meaning is often ‘a fat person’).

The origin of the word is straightforward: pie meaning ‘a baked dish with a pastry top and/or base’ and biter meaning ‘someone who or something that bites’.

The earliest documented usage in the OED is from 1863.