Word.ws English Dictionary

mad as a wet hen

mad as a wet hen adjective: very angry; furious.

Adjective

mad as a wet hen (not comparable)

  1. (US, colloquial, simile) Very angry; furious.
    • My stars! He was mad; mad as a wet hen. He was so mad he looked, as big as he was, to be actually swelled.1899, Ferdinand Eugene Daniel, “The Doctor Puts Up a Job on the Major”, in Recollections of a Rebel Surgeon

Questions about mad as a wet hen

What does mad as a wet hen mean?
Mad as a wet hen means very angry; furious.
What part of speech is mad as a wet hen?
Mad as a wet hen is an adjective.

Words near mad as a wet hen in the dictionary

  1. mad as a hatter
  2. mad as a hornet
  3. mad as a March hare
  4. mad as a meat axe
  5. mad as a mongoose
  6. mad as a wet hen
  7. mad as cut snakes
  8. mad as hops
  9. mad cap
  10. mad caps
  11. mad cow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mad as a wet 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-mad as a wet hen.wav.

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