Bantam (poultry)
any small chicken
A bantam is any small variety of fowl, usually of chicken or duck. Most large chicken breeds and several breeds of duck have a bantam counterpart, which is much smaller than the standard-sized fowl, but otherwise similar in most or all respects. A true bantam chicken is naturally small and has no large counterpart.
Etymology
The word bantam derives from the name of the seaport city of Bantam (Banten) in western Java, Indonesia. European sailors restocking on live fowl for sea journeys found the small native breeds of chicken in Southeast Asia to be useful, and any such small poultry came to be known as a bantam.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q244179. The Library of Congress control number is sh85011689. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bantam (poultry)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.