Why "chicken"

[Khadaji]

Why, when we want to say someone is cowardly, do we say he is chicken? Chickens do not seem any more or less skitish than any other bird to me and I have seen roosters show a level of agression that made me worry that I would have to hurt them in order to get them to stop attacking me...

[tomndebb]

Unless samclem can come up with an actual citation, I'm going to guess that it was a transference of chicken=girl to chicken=unmanly. The first references to chicken in the sense of cowardly appear in the U.S. in the mid-1930s, about the time that chicken=girl was fading away (having been replaced earlier by chick).

(Alternatively, it was simply grabbed out of air and employed in that sense, the way that so much slang seems to be.)

[Acsenray]

I was under the impression that it came from the phrase "chicken out," which was based on Roman superstitions regarding birds.

[Khadaji]

acsenray, that's interesting - but can you give more details? Which superstitions?

[Acsenray]

I don't remember all the details, but Romans continually looked for omens in the behaviour and innards of birds. I have a vague memory that the decision to go to battle would depend on whether a sacred chicken decided to accept its feed at a particular time.

[Peter Morris]

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable"

Young fowls are remarkably timid, and run to the wing of the hen upon the slightest cause of alarm.

[samclem]

My personal opinion dovetails with tomndebb, with the following additional opinion:

the orginal "young women" use was no doubt the first. But, in the last half of the 1800's it was also used to apply to young, inexperienced men, especially in the military.

While there are cites in the 1880'-1890's for chicken which "might" be the use we think of today, they quite often aren't clear. They could be merely talking about a novice, etc.

There is evidence that the term was used to mean cowardice as early as the 17-18th century. But the modern coward use arises only in the 1930's, as far as we have found. This gap in time would almost certainly indicate that the modern use came about on it's own.

I'm of a mind that it is similar to the "woman/girl" > "woman/girl/child" > "effeminate male" > "homosexual male." examples I gave in my report on the orgin of the word "faggot." I can see chicken referring to a girl morphing into chicken being used to describe a "sissy" male at a later date.

So, again, I agree with tomndebb.

[Chronos]

While I don't mean to dispute the esteemed non-capitalized gentlemen in this thread, the explanation I had heard (from one of my Latin teachers) was substantially different. He claimed that the use of "Chicken" for coward comes from a mistranslation from the Latin, since the Latin words for "chicken" and "Frenchman" are nearly identical (differing only in an accent mark, as I remember). The Romans spoke of cowardly Frenchmen, but translators thought they were referring to cowardly chickens.

I am, of course, open to the possibility that my Latin teacher was funning us.

[tomndebb]

I'm pretty sure, Chronos. that your Latin teacher was attempting a joke.

It is true that the Latin words for rooster/cock (gallus), hen (gallina), and the lands of the Celts Northwest of Italy, Gaul, (Gallia) are similar in appearance. However:
All three words are sufficiently common that no Latin translator would confuse them;
the Celts of Gaul were known for (and condemned for) their ferocity, not their timidity;
and we still have the problem that the word pops up in the U.S. in the 1930s with no Latin (or French or Spanish or Italian) antecedent.