Meaning
A trivially small amount of money, far below what something is worth or what a person deserves ('They offered me chicken feed for the car'). Informal and dismissive; originally American and still most at home there, though understood throughout the English-speaking world. Occasionally extended to other negligible quantities. Informal and dismissive; used chiefly about money and always minimizing it. Regional use: American English.
Origin
American in origin. The literal sense - grain of the lowest quality, given to poultry - is dated by Etymonline to 1834 in American use. The figurative sense, a paltry or contemptibly small sum of money, the same source dates to 1897 as American slang; the image is straightforward, since chicken feed is cheap, low-grade stuff that gets scattered on the ground. An early literary example cited in Wiktionary is Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al (1916), in which a baseball player shrugs off a ten-dollar dispute as 'chicken feed'. The expression was thoroughly established in American speech by the early 20th century and travelled to other varieties of English during that century; Wiktionary also records a Singapore English extension meaning a trivially easy task, which most other dictionaries do not yet note.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- mere chicken feed
- that is chicken feed
Usage Examples
- Compared with the legal fees, the parking fine was chicken feed.
- They paid him chicken feed and still expected him to be on call every weekend.
- A million dollars sounds like a fortune until you hear the stadium cost - then it is chicken feed.