Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb to spoil something by making too many improvements to it

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the phrase to over-egg the pudding

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Examples

  • Lepard uses wholemeal flour, which I think makes his cake unnecessarily heavy however – it's already squidgy and sodden with fruit and treacle, so why over-egg the pudding as it were?

    How to cook perfect Christmas cake 2011

  • The sort that can be hereditary because the females of the family are genetically predisposed to ‘over-egg the omelette’ every month.

    twins 2009

  • The sort that can be hereditary because the females of the family are genetically predisposed to ‘over-egg the omelette’ every month.

    twins 2009

  • "We have a bank of knowledge that is infinitely more urgent than any politician can understand but we have to be careful not to over-egg the rhetorical advocacy because the evidence is that, if we do, people run in the other direction."

    How the Observer brought the WWF into being Kate Kellaway 2010

  • To disregard them would be even more foolish than to over-egg their wider significance.

    Archive 2007-07-01 Stephen Tall 2007

  • Ray has clearly been to hell and back in Vietnam and bears the scars both physical and emotional but Peter Anthony doesn't over-egg this aspect, working it all into the plot discreetly yet very movingly.

    A Town Called Immaculate 2007

  • They're not, in fact, the kind of arms that have you thinking of Handel, or castrati, or a Cleopatra played with Bollywood wit, or magic flutes, or consumptive courtesans dying in attics, but that's what we're here to talk about, so I dip a toe in the water with a little rhapsody on Giulio Cesare and over-egg the pudding with a reference to McVicar's favourite period, the 18th century.

    Christina Patterson: Interview With David McVicar: "I Am Good at What I Do Because I Care So Much" 2009

  • Ray has clearly been to hell and back in Vietnam and bears the scars both physical and emotional but Peter Anthony doesn't over-egg this aspect, working it all into the plot discreetly yet very movingly.

    A Town Called Immaculate 2007

  • Obama has never seen a pudding he wasn't driven to over-egg.

    Smoking Guns and the Morality of Parliamentary Privilege 2009

  • To disregard them would be even more foolish than to over-egg their wider significance.

    What to make of the by-elections? Stephen Tall 2007

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