Loading page
say it: hen
hen is a noun meaning "adult female chicken". It is pronounced /ˈhɛn/ — hen. It carries 4 recorded senses.
adult female bird
flesh of an older chicken suitable for stewing
female of certain aquatic animals e.g. octopus or lobster
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for hen come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.