Chicken Definition: Explanation, Examples, and Fun Exercises

Define “chicken” by observing how farmers, pet owners, and everyday speakers naturally talk about this bird in various contexts from rural life to urban backyards.

Learn more about the usage of “chicken” in a different way and discover connected words to expand your English vocabulary and become more flexible while using this word to explain your thoughts.

Related nouns: animal bird rooster poultry

Synonyms (contextual): hen

Common collocations: chicken farm big chicken free-range chicken

Discover how to say “chicken” in combination with different parts of speech. This will help you to understand how collocations work, thus boosting your linguistic capabilities.

With adjectives: young chicken healthy chicken noisy chicken small chicken

With verbs: raise chickens feed chickens keep chickens hatch chickens

With nouns (noun + noun): chicken coop chicken meat chicken egg chicken feather

This bird has inspired numerous colorful expressions in English. Learning the meaning of “chicken”in idiomatic contexts will significantly reinforce your conversational skills and cultural understanding!

• Chicken out — to decide not to do something because you’re too afraid, basically to lose courage at the last moment.

  I was going to ask her out, but I chickened out at the last second.

• Don’t count your chickens before they hatch — don’t make plans based on something good that hasn’t happened yet and don’t assume success too early.

  You haven’t been accepted to the university yet, so do not count your chickens before they hatch.

• Running around like a headless chicken — acting in a panic, disorganized, confused manner; being frantic without a clear plan.

  On the morning of the exam, I was running like a headless chicken looking for my notes.

• Which came first, the chicken or the egg? — a philosophical question about circular causality; an unsolvable problem about what caused what.

  Do you need experience to get a job or a job to get experience? It’s like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg.

• No spring chicken — means not to be young anymore.

  At 60 years old, he’s no spring chicken, but he still plays basketball every weekend.

Let’s check how well you understand all the given material. Do not rush, take your time and complete this intellectual game.

Look at the other variants of how to spell “chicken.” Discover how it sounds and is pronounced in other languages such as Spanish, French and German.

“Chickens” have a higher level of intelligence and are more interesting creatures than the majority of people think — these unexpected facts will alter your viewpoint regarding these ordinary birds!

• Chickens are descended from dinosaurs.

  Researchers have gone so far as to actually mimic the process of evolution by making the chicken embryos show traits akin to dinosaurs, thus definitely connecting the modern day chickens to their long-gone ancestors such as velociraptors and T.rex.

• Chickens can recognize over 100 different faces.

  They establish complex social hierarchies (pecking orders) and have a memory of who ranks where, showing many people’s underestimation of cognitive abilities in farm birds to be a surprising thing.

• There are more chickens than humans on Earth.

  Being the most numerous bird species (estimated 33 billion) in the world, making them statistically the world’s most successful bird in terms of population. Roughly 4 chickens can be found for every human being on earth.

• Chickens communicate using over 30 different sounds.

  Such a complex communication system has separate sounds for different occasions, which include calling to warn about aerial predators as opposed to ground threats, announcing food, singing songs for laying eggs, and expressing their discomfort by calling for help.

• The world record chicken flew for 13 seconds.

  Despite being poor fliers, the world record for longest chicken flight is 13 seconds, covering a distance of 301.5 feet. Chickens were domesticated from a fowl that could fly short distances but selective breeding for meat and eggs has reduced their flying abilities significantly.

Discover what philosophers, farmers, and cultural observers have said about “chicken” in English and their metaphorical significance in human life.