Other forms: turkeys
A turkey is the big farm bird with a bare red head and a wide fan of a tail, roasted whole for Christmas in Britain and for Thanksgiving in America. Turkey sandwiches for days afterwards; a turkey too large for the oven.
The meat carries the same name: turkey breast, turkey mince, cold turkey on Boxing Day. With a capital T, Turkey is the country lying across the water between Europe and Asia, with Istanbul standing on both sides of it — its government now asks the world to write Türkiye. Going cold turkey means stopping a drug or a habit all at once, with nothing to soften it. In American English a turkey can be a flop, a film nobody went to see. Only the country takes the capital letter; the bird never does.
1nounturkeyA large bird kept on farms for its meat, with a bald head and a broad fanned tail.
“The turkey took five hours to roast.”
2nounmeatThe meat of this bird.
“He made sandwiches with cold turkey and cranberry sauce.”
3nouncountryA country lying across Anatolia and a corner of south-east Europe, with Istanbul as its largest city; written with a capital letter, and officially Türkiye.
“They spent August in Turkey and came back the colour of teak.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Turkey is a shortening of turkeycock and turkey-hen, and it first named the guinea fowl, an African bird that reached Europe by way of Turkey — though the details are argued over. When settlers met a large North American bird that looked much the same, they handed the old name straight to it, and that is the bird on the Christmas table.
From Turkey. a clipping of turkeycock and turkey-hen, originally denoting the guinea fowl, an African bird that was first imported to Europe through Turkey, but there is some controversy over the origin. The word was then transferred to the superficially similar North American bird Meleagris gallopavo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA