Word.ws English Dictionary

grey hen

grey hen noun: a female of the black grouse, Lyrurus tetrix.

grey hen: a female of the black grouse, Lyrurus tetrix
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

grey hen (plural grey hens)

  1. A female of the black grouse, Lyrurus tetrix.
    • I heard a grey hen cackling among the ling[.]1886, Peter Christen Asbjø￵rnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 28
    • That the British Greyhen differs from the typical Scandinavian bird (Lyrurus t. tetrix) has for some years been suspected by Witherby, who has been waiting to obtain sufficient material before coming to a definite conclusion. Recently Lönnberg, on comparing a Scottish killed Greyhen with Swedish...1913, H.F. Witherby, Einar Lönnberg, “The British Black Grouse”, in British Birds Journal, volume 6, page 270
    Synonyms:
    heath hen
  2. (historical) A large stone bottle for liquor.

Synonyms of grey hen

Forms of grey hen

pluralgrey hens
alternative formgreyhen
alternative formgrayhen
alternative formgray hen

Questions about grey hen

What does grey hen mean?
Grey hen means a female of the black grouse, Lyrurus tetrix.
What part of speech is grey hen?
Grey hen is a noun.
What is the plural of grey hen?
The plural of grey hen is grey hens.

Words near grey hen in the dictionary

  1. grey goo
  2. grey gum
  3. grey gums
  4. grey hat
  5. grey hats
  6. grey hen
  7. grey hens
  8. grey heron
  9. grey herons
  10. Grey Highlands
  11. grey hydrogen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: grey hen (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.

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