Wing Country

a wordwing

also: chicken wing · wings

An order is counted, not weighed: six, ten, twenty, fifty. 'A dozen' means twelve pieces, not twelve wings.

wingOld Norse vængr → Middle English weng, winge → English wing; the food sense is a straight transfer from the bird's limb

A chicken's wing, and the pieces it becomes. Off the bird it runs drumette, flat and tip; a kitchen cuts it at both joints and usually throws the tip into stock, so what a menu calls a wing is one of two pieces. Order twenty and twenty pieces arrive, roughly ten birds' worth of one wing each.

Root. Old Norse vængr → Middle English weng, winge → English wing; the food sense is a straight transfer from the bird's limb
On a menu the word slid from the whole limb to the pieces it gets cut into, so one wing off the bird sells as two or three wings. Inference — the counting unit followed the knife, not the bird. Tradition

How it is done Tradition

Say the number, then the sauce, then bone-in or boneless, then the dip. A counter that asks 'flats or drums?' is offering something most places will not.

The particulars

part of speechnoun
regionThe United States
confidencehigh · updated 2026-09-16

Who it runs with

wordsdrumetteThe upper piece, the one that looks like a small drumstick.and of this page it says: One of the two pieces a menu means when it says wing.wordsflatThe middle piece, two bones and the most skin.and of this page it says: One of the two pieces a menu means when it says wing.wordswing tipThe pointed end, usually cut off and boiled for stock.and of this page it says: The third of its three segments, and the one a menu usually leaves out of the count.the kitchenthe wing cutWhere the knife goes, and why a wing sells as two.and of this page it says: The word this cut redefines: what a menu calls a wing is one of the two pieces it makes.wordsparty wingWhat a grocery calls the drumette and the flat when it sells them already split.wordsbonelessSold under this word, cut from the breast, and argued about in court.and of this page it says: The word it borrows, which is the whole dispute.

Who talks about it

dishes · on this pagethe wing basketThe word and the counting unit this basket is measured in.organizations · on this pageNational Chicken CouncilCounts the word in portions, not birds — the unit behind every billion-wing headline.words · on this pageall flatsOne bird, two pieces, which is the arithmetic the phrase runs into.words · on this pageflapperIts third segment, counted by anatomy and not by the menu.words · on this pageweckWhat gets ordered with it, by the room rather than the person.art · on this pageRooster weathervanesThe part of the bird the vane makes its tail out of, and the part the menu sells.stories · on this pageBoneless is not a wingThe word the federal standard protects on a label and leaves unprotected on a menu.stories · on this pageThe flat and the drumThe whole limb this page takes apart, and the word that slid from the limb to its pieces.stories · on this pageThe price of a wingThe cut whose price this page tracks, from throwaway to 110 cents a pound.

Where we got it

Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.

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