1 [C] a small OVAL object with a thin hard shell produced by a female bird and containing a young bird; a similar object produced by a female fish, insect, etc:
The female sits on the eggs until they hatch. * The fish lay thousands of eggs at one time. * crocodile eggs
2 [C,U] a bird's egg, especially one from a chicken, that is eaten as food:
a boiled egg * bacon and eggs * fried / poached / scrambled eggs * Bind the mixture together with a little beaten egg. * You've got some egg on your shirt. * egg yolks / whites * egg noodles / pasta * ducks' / quails' eggs * a chocolate egg (= made from chocolate in the shape of an egg)
seealsoEASTEREGG, SCOTCHEGG
3 [C] (in women and female animals) a cell that combines with a SPERM to create a baby or young animal:
The male sperm fertilizes the female egg. * an egg donor
seealsoNESTEGG
IDIOMS
have egg on / all over your face (informal) to be made to look stupid:
They were left with egg on their faces when only ten people showed up.
put all your eggs in one basket to rely on one particular course of action for success rather than giving yourself several different possibilities:
I've applied for several jobs. I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.
moreatCHICKENn., CURATE, KILLv., OMELETTE, SUREadv., TEACH
Part of speech: verb
PHRASALVERBS
egg sb<->on to encourage sb to do sth, especially sth that they should not do:
He hit the other boy again and again as his friends egged him on.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for egg is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is egg a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, egg is tagged as noun.
Does egg appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — egg appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
