Hen

How to spell hen

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hen

What does hen mean?

1. nounA female domestic fowl, kept chiefly for laying eggs.

Hen in a sentence

• Each hen in the coop lays roughly one egg a day.

• The farmer counted every hen before locking the coop at dusk.

Where does hen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hen comes straight from Old English henn, the word for a female domestic fowl, and it has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including Dutch hen and German Henne. All of these trace back to a Germanic root that also gave us the masculine form 'hana', meaning rooster or cock, which originally carried the sense of 'the singer' or 'the one who crows'. The female bird was simply named as the counterpart to that crowing male. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, dropping only the doubled 'n' of the old form. In British usage 'hen' has also picked up the familiar extra sense of a woman celebrating before her wedding, as in a hen party.

How the word is built

• hen (from Old English henn, the female of the domestic fowl)