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Home > Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

There are two famous riddles about chickens. One investigates the reasoning behind the chicken’s desire to cross the road (“to get to the other side”), while the other poses the ontological quandary: “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

We shan’t attempt to answer the question in a philosophical or biological manner, but we can answer it lexicographically. And, looking in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), we can reveal that the answer is… not conclusive.

Chicken

Interestingly, the earliest recorded use of chicken in English refers to the ‘young of the domestic fowl’ in a simile. The word dates to an Old English interlinear gloss of the Lindisfarne Gospels: ‘Suæ henne somnigas cicceno hire.’ This is taken from Matthew 23:37, where Jesus says of Jersualem that He has ‘longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings’ (in the New International Version).

In this quotation, chicken is used to describe the young of the fowl, rather than the adult (chicken as a domestic fowl of any age is first found, according to current OED research, as late as the 19th century) – but the same verse is also one of the earliest recorded examples of hen (the adult female of the common fowl).

Egg

Things get a bit more complex when we turn our attention to egg. One of the oldest examples of the word in English is found in an Old English excerpt that translates as ‘But if it be a fast-day, they are to be given a wey of cheese, and of fish, butter, and eggs, as much as they can get’. In this instance, listed alongside cheese, fish, and butter, it is clear that the egg is (as the OED definition phrases it) ‘an egg of a domestic fowl as an article of food’.

All well and good. But we are more interested (for the purposes of this riddle) in egg meaning ‘the (more or less) spheroidal body produced by the female of birds and other animal species, and containing the germ of a new individual, enclosed within a shell or firm membrane’. Well, this is found in another Old English document: ‘On æge bið gioleca on middan’ (‘In an egg there is a yolk in the middle’). Although the egg-as-offspring must predate the egg-as-culinary-fare, we do not know which was written about first.

A draw

So, when somebody asks you “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, you can question what they mean by chicken and what they mean by egg, but you can’t offer a conclusive lexicographical answer; both date from the Old English period, so we’ll call it a draw. It is also worth noting that neither chicken nor egg have yet been revised in the ongoing creation of the third edition of the OED. It’s possible that this question will be resolved when the entries are updated, but for now we can’t be certain.

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  • Guest blogger
    Simon Thomas

    Simon Thomas previously worked in Marketing for Oxford Dictionaries, and now writes freelance. Follow his blog and find him on Twitter for more musings on language and literature.

  • Published

    October 10 / 2014

  • Categories
    • Word origins
  • Tags

    chicken, egg, OED, popular, riddle, word origins

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Comments

  • arysha azmat

    chicken

  • DavidH

    If you’re a religious person it’s an easy answer :) the chicken because the first chicken was created by god

    • ddsouza

      Depends on the religion. In many religions, the egg came first! For instance, in the Chinese myth of Pangu, chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg that hatched and formed the present universe… Come to think of it, I think a hairy giant, Pangu, was born from the cosmic egg… not a hairy giant chicken… hmm…

  • balroz

    egg

    • Anonymous

      It’s the egg, something had to have mated with another species and thus creating the egg that hatched the chicken.

      • kaijin

        i thing you are correct

  • Blabla

    Recursion

  • T I Joseph

    Per Bible, God first created all species and hence it is chicken first. If we go by the Evolution Theory, the current specie of chick came out as a surprise from one of the eggs hatched by its mother (another type of bird).

  • Arthur Goldstein

    It was the rooster. Bible Eve made from Adam’s rib. In evolution rooster evolved first and has the special characteristics, peacock feathers, to attract female as best mate to develop new character of new species.

  • preeti

    egg

  • Liton Sarkar

    পুষ্টিগুণে দুটোই আগে।
    সময় নিয়ে অকারনে মাতামাতি বাদ দেন
    সুস্বাস্থ্যের জন্য প্রয়োজনমত ডিম মুরগী দুটোই খান।

  • Harris

    on one hand, the chicken could have come first if we are talking about origins of life
    but, it also could have an egg because the ‘chicken’ would have once been a chick inside an egg, before it could reproduce further offspring in ‘eggs’.

  • Harris

    on one hand, the chicken could have come first if we are talking about origins of life
    but, it also could have been an egg because the ‘chicken’ would have once been a chick inside an egg, before it could reproduce further offspring in ‘eggs’.

  • Cas

    That is a really interesting question! I always thought that the egg came first, because could be dinossaur’s egg. ;)

    • Steve Bakewell

      Birds are dinosaurs

  • ddsouza

    Egg. First, dinosaurs and other animals laid eggs long before the chicken evolved. Second, at some point, a chicken-like creature laid an egg from which the world’s first chick emerged.

  • ddsouza

    Egg, First, dinosaurs and other animals laid eggs long before the chicken evolved. Second,

  • hash esh

    In case of Chicken , Eggs are more like Periods as in female human case. . they can’t produce off springs until get fertile . . . To make them fertile you need male sperms . . So if egg came first then you need 2 fertile eggs to get more chickens , one male n female . . . if chicken came first you dnt need male chicken , because female one is laying anyways . . . eggs shell is made from calcium with perfect oval shape . . can’t b designed without 3d printer. .

  • Courtenay

    Incidentally, in Australian English, “chicken” still usually refers to the young of the domestic fowl, rather than the adult. The baby birds are chickens; adult birds are hens or roosters. Or, colloquially, “chooks”. ;o)

  • kaijin

    if it is egg how does the egg come from ?
    if it is chicken where does the chicken come from ?

  • John W Kennedy

    One might argue that OE “æg” is the ancestor of Caxton’s famous “ey”, and that MnE “egg” is of ON origin, though the OED lists them as a single word.

  • Darrell Seymour

    God created all the animals , he had to create a hen and a rooster, which begot egg that hatched into a baby chick ! So chicken was first ! Amen?

  • Alejandro Hurtado

    What’s meaning of WEY?

  • GHigham

    The egg obviously dinosaurs laid eggs before chickens evolved. and if you want to throw religion into the mix whatever god or gods you believe in they made dinosurs before humans as a test run they then manipulated the DNA and what not too push evolution on to make a dinosaur sized chicken and an enormous cock he then shrank them using the same DNA bending method and hit the big ones on the head with the same enourmos rock he used to kill off the dinosaurs :-D they then got bored and put the idea for this question into the head of every human and forced them to ask it over a billion times and get stuck in a time loop of pointlessness and humour where no answer is satisfactory and someone asks what created the dinosaur and what created the thing before that etc.etc. until the world collapses in on itself :-D

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