chicken

chicken
\ \ [OE] Chicken is a widespread Germanic word (Dutch has kuiken, for instance, and Danish kylling), whose ancestor has been reconstructed as *kiukīnam. This was formed, with a diminutive suffix, on a base *keuk-, which some have claimed is a variant of a base which lies behind cock; if that is so, a chicken would amount etymologically to a ‘little cock’ (and historically the term has been applied to young fowl, although nowadays it tends to be the general word, regardless of age). Chick is a 14thcentury abbreviation. The modern adjectival sense ‘scared’ is a 20th-century revival of a 17thand 18th-century noun sense ‘coward’, based no doubt on chicken-hearted.
\ \ Cf.COCK

Word origins - 2ed. . 2005.

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