the-chickens-come-home-to-roost
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Detailed reference entry for the English word "the-chickens-come-home-to-roost", 31-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "the-chickens-come-home-to-roost" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "the-chickens-come-home-to-roost" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
The verdict
“the chickens come home to roost” is outside the top-ranked English vocabulary, used as a proverb - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 31
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: A person's past wrongdoings will return to negatively affect them.
Compare similar words
See how the chickens come home to roost compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | the chickens come home to roost |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proverb |
| Letters | 31 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “the chickens come home to roost” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for the chickens come home to roost is 31 letters long, classified as a proverb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A person's past wrongdoings will return to negatively affect them.".
No misspelling variants are generated for the chickens come home to roost in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: 19th century. First attested as lies, like chickens, come home to roost, although the slightly later curses, like chickens, come home to roost was more common. Both are often said to be Spanish or Turkish in origin. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs notes t… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is the chickens come home to roost, spelled T-H-E- -C-H-I-C-K-E-N-S- -C-O-M-E- -H-O-M-E- -T-O- -R-O-O-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A person's past wrongdoings will return to negatively affect them.
Etymology
19th century. First attested as lies, like chickens, come home to roost, although the slightly later curses, like chickens, come home to roost was more common. Both are often said to be Spanish or Turkish in origin. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs notes that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in The Parson's Tale: “And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.”
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “the chickens come home to roost, English word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/en/word/the-chickens-come-home-to-roost
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Using “the chickens come home to roost”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is T-H-E- -C-H-I-C-K-E-N-S- -C-O-M-E- -H-O-M-E- -T-O- -R-O-O-S-T - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter T in our English index: