hen’s teeth

noun, idiomatic

- anything not naturally occurring; extremely rare or non-existent phenomenon

- if something is as rare as hen's teeth, it is extremely rare; hens do not have teeth

Wiktionary, Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary

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PHRASE ORIGIN

The phrase "hen's teeth" has two distinct origins. The earlier use dates from 1700, when it referred to imaginary items used in April Fools' pranks. Thomas Brown's satirical work listed "Hens-Teeth" alongside other absurdities like "Spiders Brains" and "Don Quixote's Windmills"—things gullible people might be sent to find.

The modern idiom "as scarce as hen's teeth" emerged in American English during the 1830s, particularly in political writings from Virginia and North Carolina. The expression works because chickens evolved beaks instead of teeth roughly 80 million years ago—beaks are lighter and more efficient for flight. Baby chicks do have an "egg tooth," a temporary calcium spike for breaking out of shells, but it falls off within days and isn't a true tooth.

The French use a parallel expression: "quand les poules auront des dents" (when hens have teeth), meaning something is extremely unlikely or impossible. In English, the phrase typically carries a sarcastic or humorous tone to emphasize just how rare something is.

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THE SILENT UNIVERSE
Why intelligent life may be rarer than hens teeth

Our telescopes have been listening to the universe for decades and heard absolutely nothing. No alien broadcasts, no megastructures, no evidence that anyone else is out there. The Fermi paradox asks a simple question: if intelligent life is common, where is everybody?

Maybe we're it. Billions of galaxies, trillions of planets, and somehow consciousness only happened once—here, with us. Every other planet is just rocks and gas and silence. The universe spent 13.8 billion years making stars and planets until finally, on one random rock, something woke up and started asking questions.

That makes us either the loneliest accident in existence or points to something more disturbing: maybe intelligence always destroys itself. Maybe every civilization reaches a point where it develops technology powerful enough to end everything, and none of them survive that moment. Nuclear weapons almost did it for us. Climate change might still. AI could finish the job.

But here's the twist: AI might also be the only thing smart enough to save us from ourselves. We're demonstrably terrible at long-term thinking. We know the oceans are dying and the forests are burning, yet we keep doing it anyway because short-term profit beats distant survival every time. An intelligence that isn't driven by primate emotions and tribal thinking might actually solve problems we can't.

We might be the universe's only chance to understand itself and maybe the silence between the stars is a quiet invitation — a reminder that what happens here matters. If we really are the only ones who can listen, wonder, and choose, then perhaps that’s reason enough to take better care of what we have.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

a cold day in hell, a long shot, a million to one, a needle in a haystack, a pipe dream, a reach, a shot in the dark, a snowball's chance in hell, a stretch, anomalous, barely in existence, barmy, beyond the bounds of possibility, bucking the odds, don’t hold your breath, dream on, fanciful, fantastical, far out, far-fetched, fat chance, not for love nor money, harebrained, hardly possible, hard to come by, HEN’S TEETH, if pigs could fly (had wings), in short supply, iffy, like finding a needle in a haystack (getting blood from a stone, herding cats, nailing jelly to a wall), like gold dust, long odds (shot), make-believe, never in a million years, not a hope, not in a month of sundays (on the cards, likely, on your life, worth considering), once in a blue moon, pie in the sky, pipe dream, rare as rocking horse manure, slim chance, slim to none, singular, tenuous, till the cows come home, until kingdom come, virtually impossible, when fish climb trees (hell freezes over, when the sun rises in the west)



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SMUGGLE
 OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“In the entire universe, it may be that intelligent life is as rare as HEN’S TEETH.”

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P L E A S E   S U P P O R T   O W A D