egg on
Etymology
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Etymology
- From Middle English eggen, from Old Norse eggja, from egg ("edge").
- A variant of the archaic "edge on."
egg on (third-person singular simple present eggs on, present participle egging on, simple past and past participle egged on)
- (transitive, idiomatic) To encourage or coax (a person) to do something, especially something foolhardy or reckless.
- Synonyms: provoke
- 1586, William Warner, “The Fourth Booke. Chapter XX.”, in Albions England. Or Historicall Map of the Same Island: […], London: […] George Robinson [and R. Ward] for Thomas Cadman, […], →OCLC ↗, page 86 ↗:
- The Neatreſſe longing for the reſt, did egge him on to tell / How faire ſhe vvas, and vvho ſhe vvas.
- 1891 February–December, Robert Louis Stevenson, chapter XXV, in In the South Seas […], New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, published 1896, →OCLC ↗:
- He resented the idea of interference from those who had […] egged him on to a new peril.
- 1892, chapter 35, in Lesslie Hall, transl., Beowulf:
- Then I heard that at morning one brother the other / With edges of irons egged on to murder,
- 1921 October 8 – December 31, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter VIII, in Mostly Sally [The Adventures of Sally], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, published 23 March 1923, →OCLC ↗:
- She had deliberately egged him on to wreck his prospects.
- French: pousser
- German: anstiften, aufstacheln, verleiten, anspitzen (coll.)
- Portuguese: incitar, provocar
- Russian: подстрека́ть
- Spanish: provocar, incitar, azuzar, cizañar
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.003
