Word.ws English Dictionary

spring chicken

spring chicken noun: a chicken for eating while it is still young.

Noun

spring chicken (plural spring chickens)

  1. A chicken for eating while it is still young.
  2. (informal) A person who is still young.
    • You know the world. You are no spring chicken.1908, Upton Sinclair, chapter 5, in The Money Changers
    • A real candidate arose to challenge dapper Robert Rice ("Buncombe Bob") Reynolds, aging coxcomb of the Senate. The candidate, no spring chicken himself: tall, lean Clyde Roark Hoey (pronounced Hooey), 65, one of the most popular Governors the state ever had.1943 May 10, “The Pot Boils”, in Time

Forms of spring chicken

pluralspring chickens

Origin of spring chicken

From spring + chicken. First appears c. 1765 in The Public Advertiser.

Questions about spring chicken

What does spring chicken mean?
Spring chicken means a chicken for eating while it is still young.
What part of speech is spring chicken?
Spring chicken is a noun.
What is the plural of spring chicken?
The plural of spring chicken is spring chickens.

Words near spring chicken in the dictionary

  1. spring breaker
  2. spring breakers
  3. spring breaks
  4. spring cart
  5. spring carts
  6. spring chicken
  7. spring chickens
  8. spring clean
  9. spring cleaning
  10. spring cleanings
  11. spring cleans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spring 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-spring chicken.wav.

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