pecking order
pecking order
1925–30
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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| a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
| pecking order | |
| —n | |
| 1. | Also called: peck order a natural hierarchy in a group of gregarious birds, such as domestic fowl |
| 2. | any hierarchical order, as among people in a particular group |
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pecking order definition
A hierarchy within a social group or community, in which those members at the top assume positions of leadership, authority, and power. The expression originated from a description of social behavior among chickens, which attack each other by pecking to establish dominance.
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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pecking order
The hierarchy of authority in a group, as in On a space mission, the astronauts have a definite pecking order. This expression, invented in the 1920s by biologists who discovered that domestic poultry maintain such a hierarchy with one bird pecking another of lower status, was transferred to human behavior in the 1950s.
Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
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pecking order
a form of animal social structure in which a linear or nearly linear ranking exists, with each animal dominant over those below it and submissive to those above it in the hierarchy. Dominance hierarchies are best known in social mammals, such as baboons and wolves, and in birds, notably chickens (in which the term peck order or peck right is often applied)
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