Other forms: fowls
A fowl is a bird kept for its meat and eggs. Keep fowl, a guinea fowl, wildfowl on the marsh.
It once meant any bird at all, and shrank to the farmyard kind while bird took over the general job. The old sense survives in wildfowl and in fowls of the air. Foul and fowl sound the same and are quite unrelated.
1nounfowlA bird kept for its meat and eggs.
“The farmer keeps chickens, ducks and other fowl in the yard.”
fowl is a bird.
Old English fugol meant any bird, from a Germanic root. German Vogel is the same word and kept the wide sense.
Proto-Indo-European
*plewk-
Proto-Germanic
*fuglaz
Proto-West Germanic
*fugl
Old English
fugol — bird
Middle English
foul
English, today
fowl
Built from
From Middle English foul, foghel, fowel, fowele, from Old English fugol (“bird”), from Proto-West Germanic fugl, from Proto-Germanic fuglaz, dissimilated variant of fluglaz (compare Old English flugol ‘fleeing’, Mercian fluglas heofun ‘birds of the air’), from fleuganą (“to fly”). Cognate with West Frisian fûgel, Low German Vagel, Dutch vogel, German Vogel, Swedish fågel, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk fugl. a doublet of voël. More at fly.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA