Chicken: The Bird, the Meat, and an Insult About Courage
A chicken is a domestic fowl, and the meat it provides. As an adjective it means cowardly, and there is a game of nerve named after it.
The chicken is the most numerous bird on earth, kept everywhere for eggs and meat. The word doubles as an accusation of cowardice, which is unfair to the animal: hens defend their chicks fiercely, and the slur comes from the alarmed noise they make rather than from anything they do.
- A domestic fowl. *We keep six chickens.*
- Its meat. *Roast chicken for dinner.*
- A coward (informal). *Do not be such a chicken.*
- To lose nerve (chicken out). *He chickened out at the last minute.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | chicken | A free-range chicken. |
| Adjective | chicken | Too chicken to ask. |
| Phrasal verb | chicken out | They chickened out. |
| Female | hen | A laying hen. |
| Male | cockerel / rooster | A crowing rooster. |
How it is used in a sentence
- There is chicken in the fridge.Uncountable as food.
- The chickens have gone in for the night.Countable as birds.
- Do not count your chickens before they hatch.A proverb against assuming success.
Chicken words in the farmyard
- Hen — an adult female
- Rooster or cockerel — an adult male; cock is older and now avoided in some varieties of English
- Chick — a newly hatched bird
- Pullet — a young hen not yet laying
- Capon — a castrated male raised for meat
From Old English *cicen*, originally meaning a young fowl before it came to cover adults too. The domestic chicken descends mainly from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia, domesticated thousands of years ago.
Chicken or hen?
Chicken is the species and the meat. Hen specifies an adult female, which matters when talking about laying.
Where does the game of chicken come from?
Two drivers head towards each other and the first to swerve is the chicken. The term spread from 1950s America into politics and economics.