Chick

How to spell chick

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chick

What does chick mean?

1. nounA newly hatched or very young bird, especially a baby chicken.

Chick in a sentence

• The farmer watched each chick break out of its shell.

• A fluffy yellow chick followed the hen across the yard.

Where does chick come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word began life as a clipped, affectionate shortening of 'chicken', which descends from the Old English 'cicen', meaning a young domestic fowl. The longer form was related to words across the Germanic languages for the noisy young of the hen, and by the medieval period English speakers were already trimming it down to 'chike' and then 'chick' for the small fluffy hatchling. The shorter form felt cosy and diminutive, which is why it spread so easily to other small or dear things. By the early modern period 'chick' was being used tenderly of children, and the casual modern slang sense for a young woman grew out of that same affectionate impulse in the twentieth century. The spelling stays mercifully simple, a single short syllable with the hard 'ck' ending that English regularly uses after a short vowel.

How the word is built

• chick (shortened form of chicken, from Old English cicen)