11 September 2020
To egg someone on is to urge them to do something. The word has nothing to do with eggs, instead being more closely related to the word edge. It’s a borrowing of the Old Norse verb eggja meaning to incite. The noun and verb edge come from the same Germanic root, but via a different path.
The verb geeggian appears once in the extant Old English corpus, in a tenth-century gloss of the early eighth-century, Latin Lindisfarne Gospels. Mark 15:11 with its gloss reads:
Pontifices autem concitauerunt turbam ut magis barabban dimitteret eis.
(But the high priests urged the crowd to release Barabbas instead.)
ða biscobas ðonne gewæhton geeggedon ðone ðreat þætte suiðor ðone morsceaðe forleorte him
(But the bishops then deceived and egged on the crowd to have him release the thief instead.)
I give two translations into present-day English because the tenth-century Old English is subtly different from the eighth-century Latin.
The Lindisfarne Gospels were produced in Northumbria, in the north of England, and the dialect of that region has been heavily influenced by Old Norse, given that the Vikings settled in and ruled much of the area in the ninth through eleventh centuries. Most of the surviving Old English texts are written in West Saxon, spoken in the south. The word was probably more common in the Northumbrian dialect than in West Saxon, and it’s rarity is in large part due to the relatively few northern manuscripts surviving.
The verb appears in a number of Middle English manuscripts, the oldest being the Ormulum, written in the twelfth century. Lines 11683–84 read:
For deofell eggeþþ agg þe mann
To follghenn gluterrnesse.(For the devil always eggs on the man
To follow the path of gluttony.)
The Ormulum is from further south, in the East Midlands region, but the dialect there was again heavily influenced by Old Norse, and the Ormulum has fewer Anglo-Norman influences than other English texts of the same period. Even the name of the manuscript comes from Ormin, the name of the author, a common Danish name of the period. Orm means worm or dragon.
Over time, to egg on worked its way into other English dialects, until today when it can be heard wherever English is spoken.
Sources:
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. ge-eggian.
Holt, Robert. The Ormulum, vol. 2 of 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878, 51. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. eggen, v.(1).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. egg, v.1.
Skeat, Walter W. The Gospel According to Saint Mark in Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Versions. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, and Co., 1871, 125. HathiTrust Digital Archive.