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chicken

Syllabification: (chick·en)
Pronunciation: /ˈCHikən/

Translate chicken | into French | into German | into Italian | into Spanish
Definition of chicken

noun

  • 1a domestic fowl kept for its eggs or meat, especially a young one.
  • meat from a chicken:roast chicken
  • 2 informal a game in which the first person to lose nerve and withdraw from a dangerous situation is the loser.
  • a coward.
  • 3 informal (among homosexuals) an adolescent male.

adjective

[predic.] informal
  • cowardly:they were too chicken to follow the murderers into the mountains

verb

[no object] (chicken out) informal
  • withdraw from or fail in something through lack of nerve:the referee chickened out of giving a penalty

Phrases

don't count your chickens before they're hatched

see count1.

Origin:

Old English cīcen, cȳcen, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kieken and German Küchlein, and probably also to cock1

chicken in other Oxford dictionaries

Definition of chicken in the British & World English dictionary

Nearby words

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