Earmark

'earache' comes from 'Eric', if that's any help.

it's how I address snotty emails to MYB. prefaced by "now look.....". according to my diction harry it has it's origins in sheeps ears. - coincidentally roy's definition is correct regarding ownership and I suspect it has become bastardised over the years.

I believe pig is the correct answer. Lo these many years ago, I was incharged with taking an inventory of pigs on a pig farm outside of Rochester Minnesota (home of the Mayo Clinic and a famous steak house the name of which escapes me). This particular pig farm was supposedly using scientific breeding techniques, which means they had to follow the life cycle and family tree of each individual pig. In turn, this meant giving each pig an identifying mark. They started by branding a unique serial number into each pig's ear. Unfortunately, that system became corrupted when it was learned that the young pigs will nibble each other's ears a bit in the pig pen, thus causing some of the numbers to disappear. Ooops. They were looking for a solution at the time. I hope they found one. So earmark is almost surely a form of branding, though it might be something simpler, such as someone goes through the pens to select the pigs for slaughter that day and just takes a nick out of one ear of each so that they can be segregated from the rest by someone else. That would make more sense than a branding concept indicating ownership, and it would also be closer to the meaning of earmark in actual usage.

Okay, I work in agriculture and know a little about this subject. Notching pigs ears used to be commonly used to identify the pig. The right ear was notched to identify the litter and the left ear to indicate the pig's individual i.d. I don't think it's used as frequently as tagging the ears now. Many animals must have ear tags for identification purposes and to tell if they are vaccinated for certain things. But, I am supposing that is where the term earmarked originated. Hope that helps.

Bloody el' You learn something new every day !! (makes a mental note)

stop guessing you rodneys and look it up! if you use a large dictionary like the shorter OED it will tell you that the word originated in 1523: a mark in the ear of a sheep or other animal serving as a sign of ownership. in 1890 the definition ' to assign money for a specific purpose' came about from: "Sums ear marked .... for the extinction of licenses." porky

My Dear Sirs/Madams, Obviously....well to me.The well know expression 'Ear Mark' is the mark left behind when you have been listening at the door/wall to information not intended for yourself.As one would expect to act on this information at a later date, the expression has been passed onto the method of recalling information as we now know it. I strongly believe this to be by far the most rational explanation of the term so far and was confirmed to me as a child by my great aunt Miss Queenie Britain.