The world's oldest known chicken lived for 16 years, according to Guinness World Records. The average chicken may live for 5–10 years, depending on the breed. In the wild, they often scratch at the soil to search for seeds, insects, and even animals as large as lizards, small snakes, or sometimes young mice. Biology and habitatĬhickens are omnivores. Roosting is the action of perching aloft to sleep at night. the young of any bird.Īccording to Merriam-Webster, the term rooster (i.e., a roosting bird) originated in the mid- or late 18th century as a euphemism to avoid the sexual connotation of the original English cock, and is widely used throughout North America. Chick is then rarely used to mean chicken, but is mainly used in Merriam-Webster's "Sense 1b" viz. "a cooked chook" or "she keeps chooks") which enables chicken to commonly retain its original sense of a young or recently hatched bird. In Australian vernacular English the word chook provides the generic term for the species (e.g. In older sources, and still often in trade and scientific contexts, chicken as a species are typically referred to as common fowl or domestic fowl. In fact, chicken was originally a term only for an immature, or at least young, bird. Yardbird: a chicken (southern United States, dialectal) Ĭhicken may also mean a chick (see for example Hen and Chicken Islands). In the poultry industry, a pullet is a sexually immature chicken less than 22 weeks of age. Pullet: a young female chicken less than a year old.Dunghill fowl: a chicken with mixed parentage from different domestic varieties.Cockerel: a young male chicken less than a year old.Chook / tʃ ʊ k/: a chicken (Australia/New Zealand, informal).Capon: a castrated or neutered male chicken.TerminologyĪn adult male is a called a cock or (in the United States) a rooster, and an adult female is called a hen. They are known in ancient Greece from the 5th century BC. They appear in ancient Egypt in the mid-15th century BC, with the "bird that gives birth every day" having come from the land between Syria and Shinar, Babylonia, according to the annals of Thutmose III. From ancient India, the chicken spread to the Eastern Mediterranean. Genetic studies have pointed to multiple maternal origin theories within South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, but the clade found in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa originated from the Indian subcontinent. There are numerous cultural references to chickens-in myth, folklore, and religion, as well as in language and literature. There are more chickens in the world than any other bird. Chickens domesticated for meat are broilers, and for eggs, they are layers.Ĭhickens are one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, with a total population of 23.7 billion as of 2018, up from more than 19 billion in 2011. Traditionally, they were also bred for cockfighting, which is still practiced in some places. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food (consuming both their meat and eggs) or as pets. An adult female bird is called a hen, and a sexually immature female is called a pullet. A male that has been castrated is a capon. Rooster and cock are terms for adult male birds, and a younger male may be called a cockerel. They have also partially hybridized with other wild species of junglefowl (the grey junglefowl, Ceylon junglefowl, and green junglefowl). The chicken ( Gallus domesticus) is a domesticated species that arose from the red junglefowl, originally from Southeast Asia.
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