1585: Chicken and Fowl Apr 17, 2019

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While the '-en' suffix of 'chicken' is diminutive, 'chicken' is not the small form of 'chick'. In fact, every type of baby bird is called a 'chick', and at no point was 'chicken' supposed to refer to a small baby bird. Indeed, this type of bird used to only be called a 'fowl', and then through a mostly random process through history had the name 'chicken' adopted for it.

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