The Etymology of Chicken, Cock and Other Fowl Words
Food words have some seriously gnarly roots, but follow them far back enough, and you can see culinary history all tangled up in a few short syllables. Welcome to Eat Your Words
Buff Orpingtons! (Credit: Wikimedia)
Every animal we eat has a vocabulary of its own. For thousands of years, day in and day out, a large segment of humanity has been talking about these domesticated edibles, and it shows: every phase of a pig's life has a name, and every muscle on a cow. And we have a ton of words for chicken.
Etymologically, some of them are easy. "Rooster" was originally shorthand for "roosting bird," preferred by the Puritans to the double entendre of the more typical "cock." "Pullet," which specifically refers to a young hen, generally less than a year old, comes from the French for "young hen," poulette (a la today's Frenchpoulet). And a "capon" (a castrated rooster, for any non-poultry farmers out there) gets its name from a Latin word meaning the same (caponem), which itself is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to cut off" (for obvious reasons).
The less technical the word, though, the murkier its origins generally get. Despite the fact that, in any kind of practical chicken-raising situation, the majority of the flock is female, the word "hen" started out as the feminine version of the Old English word for a rooster, hana. And hana itself came from West Germanic--the linguistic ancestor of the mumbly tongues now spoken from Belgium up to Denmark--which called the male chicken a khannjo: literally, "bird who sings for sunrise."
"Cock," on the other hand, has no clear provenance. Only the French, our erstwhile linguo-twins, have a similar word (coq), while pretty much every other European tongue uses some version of that old Germanic hana or the Latin gallus. But the OED speculates that it started out as an echoic word. Cocks go "cock-a-doodle doo," after all, and tend to cluck incessantly.
Which, finally, brings us to the main dish: "chicken." The word was originally ciccen in Old English (a language that, like Italian, turned its Cs into CHs when they came before an I), but back then, it was just the plural of "chick," and only referred to group of the baby birds. The -en plural is mostly dead in English, and has been for hundreds of years, but we still have words like "oxen," "children," and "brethren" to remind us of the loosey goosey olden days. By the 19th century, though, the word had become what we know today, and became the standard name for the bird, no matter the sex or age, dead or alive.
It's unclear why, exactly, "chicken" replaced "fowl" (ultimately from the Old Germanic for "fly," fluglo) as the generic term for the common clucker, but by 1908, the Westminster Gazette asserted that it was "a disastrous betrayal of middle-class origin to speak of a 'chicken' as a 'fowl'. Whatever the age of the bird, the word must always be chicken."
Buff Orpingtons! (Credit: Wikimedia)
Every animal we eat has a vocabulary of its own. For thousands of years, day in and day out, a large segment of humanity has been talking about these domesticated edibles, and it shows: every phase of a pig's life has a name, and every muscle on a cow. And we have a ton of words for chicken.
Etymologically, some of them are easy. "Rooster" was originally shorthand for "roosting bird," preferred by the Puritans to the double entendre of the more typical "cock." "Pullet," which specifically refers to a young hen, generally less than a year old, comes from the French for "young hen," poulette (a la today's Frenchpoulet). And a "capon" (a castrated rooster, for any non-poultry farmers out there) gets its name from a Latin word meaning the same (caponem), which itself is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to cut off" (for obvious reasons).
The less technical the word, though, the murkier its origins generally get. Despite the fact that, in any kind of practical chicken-raising situation, the majority of the flock is female, the word "hen" started out as the feminine version of the Old English word for a rooster, hana. And hana itself came from West Germanic--the linguistic ancestor of the mumbly tongues now spoken from Belgium up to Denmark--which called the male chicken a khannjo: literally, "bird who sings for sunrise."
"Cock," on the other hand, has no clear provenance. Only the French, our erstwhile linguo-twins, have a similar word (coq), while pretty much every other European tongue uses some version of that old Germanic hana or the Latin gallus. But the OED speculates that it started out as an echoic word. Cocks go "cock-a-doodle doo," after all, and tend to cluck incessantly.
Which, finally, brings us to the main dish: "chicken." The word was originally ciccen in Old English (a language that, like Italian, turned its Cs into CHs when they came before an I), but back then, it was just the plural of "chick," and only referred to group of the baby birds. The -en plural is mostly dead in English, and has been for hundreds of years, but we still have words like "oxen," "children," and "brethren" to remind us of the loosey goosey olden days. By the 19th century, though, the word had become what we know today, and became the standard name for the bird, no matter the sex or age, dead or alive.
It's unclear why, exactly, "chicken" replaced "fowl" (ultimately from the Old Germanic for "fly," fluglo) as the generic term for the common clucker, but by 1908, the Westminster Gazette asserted that it was "a disastrous betrayal of middle-class origin to speak of a 'chicken' as a 'fowl'. Whatever the age of the bird, the word must always be chicken."
Read More http://www.bonappetit.com/blogsandforums/blogs/badaily/2013/06/etymology-of-chicken-word-definition.html#ixzz2XXOwIiXS
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