Other forms: hatching, hatched, hatches
To hatch is to break out of an egg. The shell cracks, a beak pushes through, and a wet chick comes out — twenty-one days for a hen, a good while longer for a goose.
It works in both directions: the chicks hatch, and the eggs hatch too. You can also hatch a plan or a plot, the picture being of something growing quietly inside until it is ready to come out, and it carries a whiff of scheming: they hatched a plan to get out of the meeting. As a noun, a hatch is a small door in a floor, a wall, a ship's deck or a plane — a serving hatch between kitchen and dining room, an escape hatch, a hatchback with its door at the rear. Batten down the hatches means brace for trouble, from sealing a ship's openings before a storm.
1verbeggTo come out of an egg.
“The ducklings hatched overnight and were gone by morning.”
2verbhatch(of an egg) To break open and let the young out.
“Only three of the six eggs hatched.”
3verbkeepTo keep eggs warm until the young come out of them.
“The hen hatched a second brood in August.”
4verbthinkTo think up a plan or a plot in secret.
“They hatched a scheme to sell the tickets on at double the price.”
5nounsmallA small opening or door in a floor, wall, ship's deck or aircraft.
“He climbed down through the hatch into the engine room.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
The hatch that is a small door goes back through Middle English hacche to Old English hæċ, a gate or grating, from a Proto-West Germanic word that is a variant of the one behind hedge. Dutch still has hek for a gate and Low German Heck for a farmyard gate. Hedge and hatch share one idea: the thing that closes a gap.
Proto-West Germanic
*hakkju
Old English
hæċ
Middle English
hacche
English, today
hatch
From Middle English hacche, hache, from Old English hæċ, from Proto-West Germanic hakkju (compare Dutch hek ‘gate, railing’, Low German Heck ‘pasture gate, farmyard gate’), variant of haggju ‘hedge’. More at hedge.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA