Rule the Roost

The phrase originally had nothing to do with a henhouse. From at least the early 1500s, the expression was "rule the roast," referring to whoever was in charge of the kitchen and its most important dish, the roast meat, effectively meaning "run the show." Over the 1700s, "roast" gradually gave way to "roost," as people leaned into the more vivid, familiar image of a rooster lording it over the rest of the henhouse. Both versions coexisted for roughly two centuries, with Shakespeare's own usage in Henry VI genuinely ambiguous between the two, before "roost" fully displaced "roast" by the 1900s.