Borrowed from Old Norse, displacing native 'eyren' — the rare case of a word replaced by its own Scandinavian cousin.
An oval or round object laid by a female bird, reptile, fish, or invertebrate, containing an embryo; also used for the common hen's egg as food.
From Old Norse 'egg,' which displaced the native Old English word 'ǣg' (pronounced roughly 'ay'). This is one of the most famous cases of Norse replacing a native English word — William Caxton himself wrote about the confusion between northern English 'egges' (Norse) and southern English 'eyren' (native) in 1490. Both the Norse and the English word descended from the same Proto-Germanic ancestor *ajją, making this a case where a cognate replaced its own twin. Key roots: *h₂ōwyóm (Proto-Indo-European: "egg (also the source of
In 1490, the printer William Caxton described a merchant who asked for 'egges' at a shop in southern England and was told they did not speak French — because the southern English form was still 'eyren.' Caxton used this anecdote to lament the difficulty of choosing a standard English, making 'egg' one of the few words whose dialectal confusion was documented in real time.