pullet

From Middle English polet, pulet, from Anglo-Norman pullet, Old French poulet (“young chicken”); polette (“young hen”), from poule (“hen”). Doublet of poult. Compare also Middle English pulle.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈpʊlɪt/

• Audio (General Australian):

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• Rhymes: -ʊlɪt

pullet (plural pullets)

1. A young hen, especially one less than a year old. [from 14th c.]

   Hypernym: poultry

   • 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, published 1973, page 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, published 2005, page 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, published 2013, page 195:

     The writer complained that a fox had been the night before and killed three more of his pullets […].

   • 1941, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie:

     “Mrs. Boast can’t have got all these from one hatching,” [Ma] said. “I do believe there’s not more than two cockerels among them.” “The Boasts have got such a head-start with chickens, likely they’re planning to eat friers this summer,” said Pa. “It may be she took a few cockerels out of this flock, looking on them as meat.” “Yes, and replaced them with pullets that will be layers,” Ma guessed. “It would be Mrs. Boast all over. A more generous woman never lived.”

2. (slang) A spineless person; a coward.
3. (obsolete, slang) A young girl.

• poultry
• pullulate

• (young girl): 1873, John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary