page_title: Chicken
section_title: Terminology
hierarchical_section_title: Chicken / Terminology
caption_attribution_description: Chicken anatomy. Teaching model representing different parts of the chicken on display at the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy, FMVZ USP. This file was published as the result of a partnership between the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP, the RIDC NeuroMat and the Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil. This GLAM project is reported. Photography: Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP. Author: Wagner Souza e Silva.
context_page_description: The chicken is a type of domesticated fowl, a subspecies of the red junglefowl. Chickens 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. There are more chickens in the world than any other bird or domesticated fowl. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food and, less commonly, as pets. Originally raised for cockfighting or for special ceremonies, chickens were not kept for food until the Hellenistic period.
  Genetic studies have pointed to multiple maternal origins in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, but with the clade found in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa originating in the Indian subcontinent. From ancient India, the domesticated chicken spread to Lydia in western Asia Minor, and to Greece by the 5th century BC. Fowl had been known in Egypt since the mid-15th century BC, with the "bird that gives birth every day" having come to Egypt from the land between Syria and Shinar, Babylonia, according to the annals of Thutmose III.
context_section_description: In the UK and Ireland, adult male chickens over the age of one year are primarily known as cocks, whereas in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, they are more commonly called roosters. Males less than a year old are cockerels.  Castrated or neutered roosters are called capons (surgical and chemical castration are now illegal in some parts of the world). Females over a year old are known as hens, and younger females as pullets, although in the egg-laying industry, a pullet becomes a hen when she begins to lay eggs, at 16 to 20 weeks of age. In Australia and New Zealand (also sometimes in Britain), there is a generic term chook /tʃʊk/ to describe all ages and both sexes. The young are often called chicks.
  Chicken originally referred to young domestic fowl. The species as a whole was then called domestic fowl, or just fowl.  This use of chicken survives in the phrase Hen and Chickens, sometimes used as a British public house or theatre name, and to name groups of one large and many small rocks or islands in the sea .
  In the Deep South of the United States, chickens are referred to by the slang term yardbird.
caption: Didactic model of a chicken.
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