Egg

How to spell egg

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce egg

What does egg mean?

1. nounThe oval reproductive body laid by birds, especially a hen's, used as food.
2. verbTo urge or encourage someone to do something, usually something unwise; chiefly in the phrase 'egg on'.

Egg in a sentence

• noun

  She cracked one egg into the hot frying pan.

• verb

  The crowd would egg him on until he agreed to the dare.

• noun

  Every egg in the carton was checked for cracks before sale.

• verb

  His friends began to egg the driver on to go faster.

Where does egg come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The familiar noun comes from the Old Norse word egg, brought to Britain by Norse settlers during the Viking age. It gradually replaced the native Old English form, which was ey or ǣg; for a time both words competed, and there is a famous tale from the early printer William Caxton in 1490 describing the confusion between northern 'egges' and southern 'eyren'. The Norse version eventually won out across English, which is why we spell it with the doubled g today. The verb sense in 'to egg someone on' has a separate but related Old Norse source, eggja, meaning 'to incite' or 'to give an edge to', and it is a cousin of the ordinary word 'edge'. So the short, simple spelling actually hides two different Norse imports that merely look identical.

How the word is built

• egg (single root noun, from Old Norse egg)