table bird

table bird (plural table birds)

1. A chicken or other poultry raised for meat (as opposed to laying eggs); a wild bird hunted for its meat.

   Coordinate term: layer

   • 1884, William Edwin Hamilton, Muskoka Sketch‎^[1], page 36:

     Among table birds, the partridge is so very abundant in some localities that it seems like butchery to kill them by the half dozen.

   • 1950, Doris Lessing, chapter 7, in The Grass Is Singing‎^[2], published 1969, page 128:

     […] she ran chickens on quite a big scale now, and made a few pounds every month from eggs and table birds;

   • 1962, Anthony Burgess, chapter 6, in The Wanting Seed‎^[3], published 1965, section 2, page 88:

     The leader called, himself unfortunately plump as a table bird, ‘Let them listen to the crying-out of the empty guts of the workers.’