| 词汇 | bad egg |
| 词源 | bad egg; good egg. Shakespeare used the word egg to con- temptuously describe a young person in Macbeth, when the murderers of Macduff ’s son cry, “What you egg! Young fry of treachery!” But the expression bad egg for a disreputable, thor- oughly rotten person doesn’t seem to have been coined until the mid-18th century in America, no matter how obvious the analogy might seem. “American criminal Thomas Egg” isn’t in any way responsible for the expression; it derives from just the odor of a bad egg itself. Good egg, for a “nice guy,” came along about 50 years later, probably originating as Oxford University slang. |
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英语词源词典收录了13259条英语词源词条，基本涵盖了全部常用英语词汇的起源、历史，是研究英语词汇或通过词源学英语的必备工具。