Meaning
The classic causality dilemma: when two things each appear to depend on the other, which one produced the first? Used rhetorically of any circular or seemingly unresolvable priority dispute, and as the hyphenated modifier 'chicken-and-egg', as in a chicken-and-egg problem. Slightly wry or exasperated in tone rather than a genuine question about poultry. Usually rhetorical and wry; the hyphenated modifier implies circular causality rather than a real question. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The paradox is ancient. Aristotle in the fourth century BCE treated the sequence as infinite, with no first member; Plutarch in the first or second century CE made the question a topic of table talk in his Moralia (the Quaestiones convivales, also published as 'The Symposiacs'), where one guest argues the egg came first and another that the perfect must precede the imperfect; Macrobius in the fifth century CE judged the question more important than it looked. Philemon Holland's English translation of the Moralia (1657) renders the question as 'Whether was before, The hen or the egge?'. The earliest English uses of the chicken-and-egg phrasing traced by Word Histories are two letters in the Boston Investigator (21 March 1855 and 18 November 1857), which already speak of 'Which was first - the chicken or the egg?' and 'the chicken and egg controversy' as familiar references. The modern attributive use, a chicken-and-egg situation, extends the old puzzle to any circular cause-and-effect argument, and evolutionary biology has since offered its own answers to the original question.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- chicken or egg
- chicken-and-egg problem
- hen or egg
- the chicken or the egg
- which came first
Usage Examples
- Which came first, the chicken or the egg - do cheap fares attract riders, or do riders justify cheap fares?
- Their dispute had turned into a chicken-and-egg problem: no bank loan without a lease, no lease without a loan.
- Historians still argue over the company's rise like a chicken-or-egg riddle: did the reputation drive the results, or the results the reputation?