In a Word: The Chicken or the Egg

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Philosophers, scientists, and historians have been asking and answering that question for ages, and we still seem a long way off from a definitive answer.

But this is a column about etymology, and, thankfully, we can definitively tell which word — chicken or egg — came to English first. And uncovering that answer reveals a few other surprises.

We’ll start with chicken.

The word is pretty old. In the Middle English period (approximately A.D. 1066-1500), it was more like chiken, which was a change from the Old English (approximation A.D. 400-1100) cicen, which was cicenu in the plural. Some form of chicken, then, has pretty much always been a part of the English language, though the sense wasn’t always limited to the type of bird that would taste great with 11 herbs and spices.

Because chicken has been around so long, you might think it would be hard for egg to predate it. And you’d be right.

What we know as egg originated among (Middle) English speakers in northern Britain around the 1300s. English in the north picked up the word from Old Norse egg. Old English used the similar-looking word æg, which was pronounced more like “eye” and evolved straight from its Germanic roots. By the Middle English period, in some parts of England (especially the south), it had become ei, which, not coincidentally, is identical to the modern German word for “egg.” The plural Middle English of ei was eyren.

Northern eggs and southern eyren coexisted in Britain for a time — and this was certainly not the only case of two words for single concept vying for dominance in the language. Differences in not only spelling but in the actual word for a thing were common, but in the 1400s, it became a different kind of problem for people using a new kind of technology, namely the printing press.

William Caxton, who is credited with bringing the first printing press to England in 1476, uses the northern eggs vs. southern eyren situation to illustrate a dilemma that printers constantly faced: Which English should be recorded in print? The introduction to his 1490 book Eneydos included a section that began “That comyn Englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a-nother…” Here’s a modern-day translation of the pertinent section:

That common English that is spoken in one shire varies from another, so that in my days it happened that certain merchants were in a ship on the Thames to sail over the sea to Zealand, and for lack of wind, they tarried at Foreland, and went to land to refresh themselves. And one of them named Sheffelde, a mercer, came to a house and asked for food, and especially he asked for egges, and the good woman answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but wanted to have egges, and she did not understand him. And then at last another said that he wanted eyren. Then the good woman said that she understood him well. Lo, what should a man in these days now write, egges or eyren? Certainly it is hard to please every man, because of diversity and change of language.

So, to answer the original question, chicken came before egg in English. There is another egg, though, that adds an unexpected twist to the story.

If you’ve ever “egged someone on,” you’re using a word that first appeared in print in English around A.D. 1200 — and has absolutely nothing to do with the things that come out of birds’ bottoms. It comes from the Old Norse eggja “to goad, incite” and is related to the Old English ecg, which evolved into the modern edge.

Which means English speakers were egging people on even before they had eggs!