Word.ws English Dictionary

rubber chicken

rubber chicken noun: a hollow, bright yellow toy or prop depicting a plucked chicken that emits a squeak when squeezed.

Noun

rubber chicken (countable and uncountable, plural rubber chickens)

  1. (literal) A hollow, bright yellow toy or prop depicting a plucked chicken that emits a squeak when squeezed.
    • The hack comic produced a rubber chicken, to the groans and boos of the audience.
    • Men who have squeaked the rubber chicken on Broadway, or wooed humanity with a fringe of swaying, porpoise-hide shoe-laces, were swallowed up in the gray shadows of the storm.1888 March 17, Bill Nye, “Bill Nye and the Blizzard”, in The World, page 5
  2. (attributive, colloquial, uncountable, usually) The mediocre food served at social events, especially political fundraisers.
    • The bill of fare consisted of an india-rubber chicken and boiled eggs.1883 November 9, “Odds and Ends”, in Gloucester Citizen, page 4
    • It was the hoedowns and the caucuses and the rubber chicken dinners and the big DFL blowouts at the Minneapolis Auditorium.1997, Jim Klobuchar, Minstrel: My Adventure in Newspapering, page 88
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see rubber, chicken.

Examples of rubber chicken in a sentence

  • The rubber chicken is probably the best example of a prop used for schtick.1988, Mark Stolzenberg, How to Be Really Funny, page 63:
  • What the hell have you devoted all these years to politics for if all you want to do is to work the rubber chicken circuit and hang out with elderly activists!'2020, John Bercow, Unspeakable: The Sunday Times Bestselling Autobiography:
  • I found both the rubber chicken and the political offering equally unappetising.2021, Elizabeth Farrelly, Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City's Soul:

Forms of rubber chicken

pluralrubber chickens

Origin of rubber chicken

The name derives from the fact that the quality of the food often served at such events is secondary to the purpose of the events and seldom good.

Questions about rubber chicken

What does rubber chicken mean?
Rubber chicken means a hollow, bright yellow toy or prop depicting a plucked chicken that emits a squeak when squeezed.
How do you use rubber chicken in a sentence?
The rubber chicken is probably the best example of a prop used for schtick.
What part of speech is rubber chicken?
Rubber chicken is a noun.
What is the plural of rubber chicken?
The plural of rubber chicken is rubber chickens.

Words near rubber chicken in the dictionary

  1. rubber cements
  2. rubber check
  3. rubber checks
  4. rubber cheque
  5. rubber cheques
  6. rubber chicken
  7. rubber chickens
  8. rubber diaper
  9. rubber diapers
  10. rubber duck
  11. rubber duck debugging

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rubber 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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-rubber chicken.wav.

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