The ubiquity of the chicken as a domestic fowl has often led to the name of this poultry being applied to humans. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the word chicken could be used to refer to a child, much the way kid—a goat’s offspring—still is. Since the early seventeenth century, the word has also denoted a coward, someone who’s a “fraidy-cat.” Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century chicken also meant a naive person, an easy target, a “pigeon,” so to speak. And since the 1920s the diminutive of chicken—chick—has been bestowed on attractive women, also known as “foxes.” The word chicken is very old: it first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, having derived from an even older Germanic source that also evolved into the Dutch kieken, the German kuchlien, and the Swedish kjukling.
Slang for a teenager (male) prostitute.
The term “chicken” typically refers to a young male or female fowl that is commonly used for table consumption. However, the term can also be used more broadly to refer to a fowl of any age.