chicken

«chicken» in Mova's school dictionary: a farm bird that lays eggs — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (chicken, chickens); adjective (chicken — scared, slang); verb (chicken out)

meaning for a pupil

1) A chicken is a farm bird that lays eggs. tree →

2) Chicken is also the meat of this bird, which people eat. tree →

3) In slang, «chicken» means scared, and to «chicken out» is to be too scared to do something. tree →

sense in the lessons

In school maths: a counted animal with 2 legs; a farm laying eggs each day; chicken as food bought by weight; «chickens and rabbits» legs puzzles. In science: chickens hatch from eggs (life cycles); they are birds but can hardly fly. In everyday life: roast chicken, chicken soup, keeping hens in a garden. Phrases: «chicken and egg» (which came first?), «don't count your chickens before they hatch».

examples

• A farmer has 12 chickens and 5 cows. tree →
• Each chicken lays 1 egg a day. tree →
• Chickens and rabbits have 40 legs in all. tree →
• Mum buys 2 kg of chicken. tree →
• A chicken has 2 legs and 2 wings. tree →
• The chicks hatched from their eggs today. tree →
• We had roast chicken for Sunday lunch. tree →
• He wanted to jump but chickened out. tree →
• ‘I’ll eat one of these chickens.’ tree →

note

Animal: countable («a chicken»); meat: uncountable («some chicken»). A hen is a female chicken, a rooster or cock is a male, a chick is a baby. Maths: a counted animal; a chicken has 2 legs, which matters in legs problems. Trap: in «chickens and rabbits» puzzles the legs differ (2 and 4). Safety: always cook chicken all the way through.

In the corpora

• Snap a chicken bone from Sunday dinner and it is hollow, with thin struts inside like a bridge, light but strong.
• Chickens scratch and peck for seeds, worms and insects; they are omnivores and will even eat mice and small frogs.
• Foxes hunt chickens, which cannot fly well and sleep deeply at night, so a hen house must be shut every evening.
• Snap the wishbone of the Sunday chicken and you hold the same two joined collarbones that T. rex and Velociraptor had.
• Carve a roast chicken and you can count two legs, two wings and two breasts, each a different muscle.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «chicken» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.