Other forms: eggs
An egg is a white or brown oval food that comes from a hen. Boil an egg, fried egg, a dozen eggs.
The shell colour depends on the breed and makes no difference to the taste. British eggs carry a lion mark for salmonella vaccination, which is why raw egg is treated as safe here and not everywhere. Note walking on eggshells; put all your eggs in one basket; egg somebody on, which is a different word entirely, from an Old Norse verb meaning to urge.
1nouneggThe oval food laid by a hen.
“I had a boiled egg and toast for breakfast.”
2nouncellThe cell from which an animal develops.
“Each month, a woman's body releases an egg.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
egg is a food or a reproductive cell.
Old Norse egg replaced the Old English ey in the fifteenth century, and Caxton complained about not knowing which to print. The Norse form won.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂éwis
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂ōwyóm — egg
Proto-Germanic
*ajją — egg
Old Norse
egg — egg
Middle English
eg
English, today
egg
Built from
The noun is derived from Middle English eg, egg, egge (“egg of a domestic or wild fowl; egg of a snake”) aig, eeg, ege, hegge originally Northern England and Northeast Midlands, from Old Norse egg (“egg”), from Proto-Germanic ajją (“egg”) (by Holtzmann’s law), from Proto-Indo-European h₂ōwyóm (“egg”), probably from h₂éwis (“bird”), from h₂ew- (“to consume”). a doublet of huevo and oeuf and ovum. 2 Cognate with frr ai (“egg”), stq Oai (“egg”), West Frisian aai, aei (“egg”), bar Oa (“egg”), Dutch ei (“egg”), German Ei (“egg”), German Low German Ai, Ägg (“egg”), li ei, Éï (“egg”), lb Ee (“egg”), mhn oi (“egg”), wym e (“egg”), Yiddish איי (“egg”), Danish æg (“egg”), Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk egg (“egg”), Swedish ägg (“egg”), gme-cgo ada (“egg”); also Breton vi (“egg”), kw oy (“egg”), Welsh wy (“egg”), Latin ōvum (“egg”), Greek αβγό, αυγό (“egg”), Albanian vo (“egg”), be and Russian яйцо́ (“egg”), Bulgarian яйце́ (“egg”), Czech vejce (“egg”), mk јајце (“egg”), Polish jajo (“egg”), Serbo-Croatian ја́јце, jájce (“egg”), Slovak vajce (“egg”), Slovene jájce (“egg”), Ukrainian яйце́ (“egg”), os айк, айкӕ (“egg”), Armenian ձու (“egg”), kmr hêk (“egg”), sdh خا (“egg”), zza hak (“egg”), ps هګۍ, ويه (“egg”), Persian خاگ, خایه (“egg”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA