Fowl are birds that people raise for their meat or eggs, like chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese. When you eat chicken for dinner or scramble eggs for breakfast, you're eating food that comes from fowl.

The word has been used for over a thousand years. Farmers have kept fowl in barnyard coops and ponds since ancient times, and today poultry farming (another name for raising fowl) provides food for billions of people worldwide. A chicken is the most common type of fowl, but the category includes many domestic birds.

People sometimes use “fowl” more broadly to mean any bird, especially in old-fashioned expressions. If you hear someone talk about “wild fowl,” they mean birds like ducks or geese in their natural habitat, not on a farm. Hunters might go out for waterfowl like ducks during hunting season.

The phrase “neither fish nor fowl” describes something that doesn't fit into any clear category, like a movie that's neither comedy nor drama but somewhere awkwardly in between. And watch out for confusion: fowl (the bird) sounds exactly like foul (meaning bad or against the rules), but they're spelled differently and mean completely different things.