Pullet

Pronunciation

• UK IPA: /ˈpÊŠlɪt/
• Rhymes: -ÊŠlɪt

Origin

From Anglo-Norman pullet, poulet ("young chicken"); polette ("young hen"), from poule ("hen").

Full definition of pullet

Noun

1. A young hen, especially one less than a year old. from 14th c.
• 1646, Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I.11:They died not because the Pullets would not feed: but because the Devil foresaw their death, he contrived that abstinence in them.
• 1749, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Folio Society 1973, p. 588:The dinner-hour being arrived, Black George carried her up a pullet, the squire himself ... attending the door.
• 1891, Mary Noailles Murfree, In the "Stranger People's" Country, Nebraska 2005, p. 187:he recommended that the patient ... should be fed with chicken broth, and suggested that as all the poultry had gone to roost, Maggie would find a fat young pullet an easy capture.
• 1928, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Penguin 2013, p. 195:The writer complained that a fox had been the night before and killed three more of his pullets ….
2. (slang) A spineless person; a coward.