Word.ws English Dictionary

chickening

chickening is the present participle and gerund of chicken.

Meaning of chicken

Verb

chicken (third-person singular simple present chickens, present participle chickening, simple past and past participle chickened)

  1. (intransitive) To avoid a situation one is afraid of.
    • For the umpteenth time, I chickened.1964, Max Shulman, Anyone Got a Match?, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, →OCLC, page 31

See all 14 meanings of chicken

Phrases with chickening

Questions about chickening

What is chickening the present participle and gerund of?
Chickening is the present participle and gerund of chicken.

Words near chickening in the dictionary

  1. chickenhood
  2. chickenhouse
  3. chickenhouses
  4. chickenier
  5. chickeniest
  6. chickening
  7. chickening out
  8. chickenish
  9. chickenization
  10. chickenize
  11. chickenized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chickening (page history and authors); chicken (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “chickening.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chickening. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.