cockerel

UK/ˈkɒkəɹəl/US/ˈkɑkəɹəl/

nounB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,641 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: cockerels

A cockerel is a young male chicken. Keep a cockerel, the cockerel crowed, one cockerel to ten hens.

Strictly it is under a year old, after which he is a cock or a rooster, though few people keep the distinction. Many places ban keeping a cockerel in a garden, since the crowing starts long before dawn.

Definitions of cockerel

1nouncockerelA young male chicken.B2+
“The cockerel crowed at dawn and woke the whole farmhouse.”

cockerel is a bird.

Also accepted in games: rooster

Where it comes from

Middle English kokerel is cock plus a suffix marking a young or small one.

Middle English
kokerel
English, today
cockerel

From Middle English kokerel. by surface analysis, en + cock + rel.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Farm & Countryside

Practise this word

cockerel in the wild

Although partly functional, wind vanes are generally decorative, often featuring the traditional cockerel design with letters indicating the points of the compass.
Weather vane
In a sufficiently strong wind, the head of the arrow or cockerel (or equivalent) will indicate the direction from which the wind is blowing.
Weather vane
Gallus (the cockerel) was a constellation introduced in 1612 by Petrus Plancius.
Gallus (constellation)
Hahn/Cock is a sculpture of a giant blue cockerel by the German artist Katharina Fritsch.
Hahn/Cock
The 3-metre tall cockerel was sculpted by Peter Parkinson and erected in 2007.
Dorking Cockerel

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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