chicken [OE] A word that probably has the same ancient root as *cock. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched is recorded from the 16th century, and refers to one of Aesop’s fables of 2,000 years earlier, in which a girl carrying a pail of milk to market dreams about buying chickens with the profit from the milk and becoming rich through selling eggs. In her daydream she sees herself as being so wealthy that she would simply toss her head at all her would-be lovers, at which point she tosses her head and spills the milk. Chickens coming home to roost is a form of the proverb, dating from the 14th century, curses, like chickens, come home to roost.