WOG stands for without giblets: a ready-to-cook whole broiler carcass with the giblet pack, meaning the liver, heart and gizzard, removed. It is the standard form a whole chicken trades in. Say whole bird on a trading desk and a WOG is almost always what both sides mean. Some houses also mark birds sold without the neck as WOGN, though in practice WOG is the word the trade uses for the plain empty bird.
Why the term exists
A whole bird can be sold several ways: with the giblet pack tucked back into the cavity, without it, further processed, or cut up. The trade needed one unambiguous word for the base product, and WOG is it. When a quote sheet, a spec, or a market report prices whole birds, a WOG is the underlying product being described.
Weight ranges are the spec
WOGs are bought and sold in weight ranges, and the range is most of the spec. A rotisserie program needs birds inside a tight band so every unit cooks the same and looks the same in the case. A further processor sizing for parts has different needs entirely. Two WOG quotes at different weight ranges are quotes for different products, which is why a whole bird price without its weight range attached is only half a number.
Where WOGs show up in the data
Whole bird values are part of USDA's weekly chicken reporting alongside the parts market, and Meat Read tracks the whole bird composite next to the parts series on the poultry pages. The composite is the benchmark for the bird as a whole. The parts prices tell you which pieces of it the market actually wants that week, and the two can tell very different stories at the same time.