Most Czech neuters keep the same stem all the way through their declension: město stays měst-, moře stays moř-. The kuře ("chick") group breaks that comfortable habit. These neuters — mostly the names of young animals — grow an extra syllable when you put them into any case beyond the bare nominative: -et- appears throughout the singular, and -at- appears throughout the plural. The word for "chick" is kuře, but "of the chick" is kuřete and "chicks" is kuřata. Miss the inserted syllable and you have not just an odd-sounding form — you have a non-word.
Why the stem grows
This is a relic of an old Indo-European noun type whose stem genuinely ended in a consonant cluster (-nt-) that only surfaced once an ending was attached. The bare nominative kuře lost that cluster; every other form preserves a flattened trace of it as -et- (singular) or -at- (plural). You do not need the history to use the words, but it explains the one thing English speakers find unbelievable: that a noun can be two syllables in the dictionary and three syllables the moment you do anything with it.
The full kuře paradigm
Here is kuře through all seven cases. Notice the clean split: everything in the left column carries -et-, everything in the right column carries -at-.
| Case | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative (kdo? co?) | kuře | kuřata |
| Genitive (koho? čeho?) | kuřete | kuřat (zero ending) |
| Dative (komu? čemu?) | kuřeti | kuřatům |
| Accusative (koho? co?) | kuře (= nominative) | kuřata (= nominative) |
| Vocative (oslovení) | kuře | kuřata |
| Locative (o kom? o čem?) | (o) kuřeti | (o) kuřatech |
| Instrumental (kým? čím?) | kuřetem | kuřaty |
Look closely at the plural and you will recognise an old friend: once the stem is kuřat-, the endings are exactly město's hard-neuter plural endings — -a, -∅, -ům, -ech, -y (kuřata, kuřat, kuřatům, kuřatech, kuřaty, just like města, měst, městům, městech, městy). The genitive plural kuřat has the same bare zero ending that surprises learners in měst. So the plural is not a strange new declension at all; it is město's plural sitting on top of the expanded -at- stem.
Na dvoře pobíhala žlutá kuřata.
Yellow chicks were running around in the yard.
Polévku nejradši vařím z celého kuřete.
I like best to make the soup from a whole chicken.
Dej kuřeti trochu vody, je horko.
Give the chick some water, it's hot.
Notice in that first example that kuřata is a neuter plural, so its verb takes the neuter-plural past ending -a: pobíhala, not pobíhaly. This catches everyone, because -a there looks identical to a feminine singular. We return to it under Common Mistakes.
Who belongs to this group
The core membership is the young of animals, plus a short list of other concrete neuters that drifted in. Learn them as a closed set — Czech is not adding new members.
| Nominative sg. | Meaning | Genitive sg. (-et-) | Nominative pl. (-at-) |
|---|---|---|---|
| kuře | chick | kuřete | kuřata |
| tele | calf | telete | telata |
| štěně | puppy | štěněte | štěňata |
| prase | pig | prasete | prasata |
| zvíře | animal | zvířete | zvířata |
| rajče | tomato | rajčete | rajčata |
| koště | broom | koštěte | košťata |
| dítě | child | dítěte | děti (irregular) |
Two members repay a second look. Prase ("pig") is not a baby animal, yet it sits here — proof that the group is defined by its declension, not strictly by meaning. And in the plurals štěňata and košťata, the consonant before the -at- softens (n → ň, t → ť) exactly as it does elsewhere in Czech before front vowels; this is regular palatalisation, not a separate rule to memorise.
Bojí se i malého štěněte, je to strašpytel.
He's scared even of a small puppy — he's a real scaredy-cat.
Štěňata si celé odpoledne hrála na zahradě.
The puppies played in the garden all afternoon.
Do salátu nakrájej dvě rajčata a okurku.
Cut two tomatoes and a cucumber into the salad.
Telata se pásla na louce za stodolou.
The calves were grazing in the meadow behind the barn.
The special case of dítě
Dítě ("child") is the one member of this group an English speaker uses every day, and it is half-irregular. In the singular it is a perfectly ordinary kuře-type neuter: dítě, dítěte, dítěti, dítětem. But it has no kuře-style plural — *dítata does not exist. Instead the plural is the suppletive děti ("children"), which declines as a feminine i-stem (like kost): děti, dětí, dětem, dětmi. So the word literally changes gender between singular and plural.
To dítě usnulo až po půlnoci.
The child didn't fall asleep until after midnight.
Dej tu hračku tomu dítěti, ať nepláče.
Give that toy to the child so it stops crying.
Naše děti chodí do stejné školy.
Our children go to the same school.
The suppletive plural děti is covered in full on the irregular noun dítě/děti page; here, just lock in that the singular dítě is a textbook kuře noun.
How English speakers go wrong
The errors here are not about choosing the right ending — they are about remembering that the stem changed at all.
The number-one mistake is failing to expand the stem, treating kuře as if it declined like the soft neuter moře (moře, moře, moři, mořem). That gives the tempting but wrong *z kuře, *kuři, *kuřem. The whole point of this group is that those forms must grow a syllable: z kuřete, kuřeti, kuřetem.
❌ Maso z kuře je libovější než vepřové.
Wrong — the genitive must expand the stem; 'z kuře' is a non-form.
✅ Maso z kuřete je libovější než vepřové.
Correct: Chicken meat is leaner than pork.
❌ Dal jsem vodu kuři a zavřel kurník.
Wrong — the dative is kuřeti, not the moře-style 'kuři'.
✅ Dal jsem vodu kuřeti a zavřel kurník.
Correct: I gave the chick water and closed the coop.
The second mistake is not expanding into the plural — using the bare stem as if these were ordinary neuters, so *tři kuře for "three chicks." The plural must carry -at-: tři kuřata.
❌ V kleci byla tři kuře a jedno tele.
Wrong — the plural needs the -at- stem: kuřata, not 'kuře'.
✅ V kleci byla tři kuřata a jedno tele.
Correct: There were three chicks and one calf in the pen.
The third mistake is agreement in the plural. Because kuřata ends in -a, English speakers (and the eye) want to treat it as feminine and write a feminine-plural verb in -y. But kuřata is neuter plural, so its past-tense participle ends in -a: kuřata běhala, never *kuřata běhaly. This is the single most-corrected slip with these nouns.
❌ Kuřata se vylíhly už včera ráno.
Wrong — neuter plural takes -a on the participle, not the feminine -y.
✅ Kuřata se vylíhla už včera ráno.
Correct: The chicks hatched yesterday morning already.
Key takeaways
- The defining feature is stem expansion: -et- runs through the entire singular (kuře → kuřete, kuřeti, kuřetem), -at- through the entire plural (kuřata, kuřat, kuřatům, kuřaty).
- The plural endings on the -at- stem are simply the hard-neuter město plural endings, including the bare zero genitive kuřat.
- The group is a closed set, mostly young animals, plus prase, zvíře, rajče, koště and the singular of dítě.
- Dítě uses this declension only in the singular; its plural děti is a feminine i-stem.
- The -a of the plural is neuter, so verbs and adjectives agree as neuter plural (participle in -a), never feminine.
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Start learning Czech→Related Topics
- Neuter: The Město ParadigmA2 — The hard neuter pattern město (town/city) — the model for neuter nouns ending in -o, with its full seven-case table, the zero genitive plural, and the fill vowel.
- Neuter Paradigms ComparedB1 — A side-by-side of město, moře, kuře, and stavení to fix the neuter declension system — and a one-line rule for telling them apart.
- Dítě and Děti: The Child/Children SuppletionA2 — How the high-frequency noun dítě (child) declines as a neuter in the singular but switches to the suppletive feminine plural děti (children), with its full table.
- How to Read a Declension TableA1 — A practical guide to reading the standard Czech declension table laid out by case and number.
- The Three Genders of Czech NounsA1 — Every Czech noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter — a grammatical property that drives its declension and forces agreement on everything around it.