Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A cup for use in eating soft-boiled eggs.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A cup used for holding an egg, at table.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun dishware consisting of a small cup for serving a boiled egg
- noun dishware consisting of a small cup for serving a boiled egg
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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She removed the saucer filled with sugar, leaving a few pieces on the table-cloth; Nanon carried off the egg-cup; Madame Grandet sat up like a frightened hare.
Eug�nie Grandet 2007
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About that coerogenal hun and his knowing the size of an egg-cup.
Finnegans Wake 2006
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Wow - your parcel looks really wonderful - and I LOVE the shot of the birdy egg-cup is it even an egg-cup?
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Of course I should still have been safe enough, being like an egg in an egg-cup, too big to care for the bottom; still I wished that all should be done, in good order, without excitement.
Lorna Doone Richard Doddridge 2004
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If the link of chain had flown upwards (for half a link of chain it was which took him in the mouth so), even one inch upwards, the poor man could have needed no one except Parson Bowden; for the bottom of his skull, which holds the brain as in the egg-cup, must have clean gone from him.
Lorna Doone Richard Doddridge 2004
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The experiments of alchemy are not conducted within the confines of an egg-cup.
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The experiments of alchemy are not conducted within the confines of an egg-cup.
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Tims put down the egg-cup and the plate on the table before she relaxed the wrinkle of carefulness and grinned triumphantly at her patient.
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Mix the fruit with the necessary sugar, and it the tart is made with a top crust only, a little water can be added and an egg-cup or a little tea-cup should be placed in the pie-dish upside down to keep up the crust.
Dr. Allinson's cookery book Comprising many valuable vegetarian recipes
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Harkness, seeing her concern, dexterously broke a soft-boiled egg into a silver egg-cup and said in a carefully casual voice, intended to put the fire quite out of their minds: "Well, the constable'll find the man what did it, so don't you worry your head, Missy."
Red-Robin Jane Abbott
fbharjo commented on the word egg-cup
* Colonial taverns kept their spirits (rum, brandy, whiskey, gin, applejack) in casks, and as the liquid in the casks lowered, the spirits would tend to lose both flavor and potency, so the tavern keeper would have an additional cask into which the tailings from the low casks could be combined and sold at a reduced price, the patrons requesting the "cock tailings" or the tailings from the stop cock of the cask. This was H.L. Mencken’s belief.
* Cocktails were originally a morning beverage, and the cocktail was the name given as metaphor for the rooster (cocktail) heralding morning light of day. This was first posited in 2004 by Ted Haigh in "Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails", and can be distinguished from the theory "take two snips of the hair of the dog that bit you", which refers to consuming a small bit of alcohol the morning after a "binge drinking night" to curb the effects of the symptoms of the hangover, which symptoms are actually the result of a mini-withdrawal/down-regulation effect.
* Some say that it was customary to put a feather, presumably from a cock’s tail, in the drink to serve both as decoration and to signal to teetotalers that the drink contained alcohol.
What is the bitters truth?
* Another etymology is that the term is derived from coquetier, a French egg-cup which was used to serve the beverage in New Orleans in the early 19th century.
first attested 1806; H.L. Mencken lists seven versions of its origin, perhaps the most persuasive is Fr. coquetier "egg-cup." In New Orleans, c.1795, Antoine Amédée Peychaud, an apothecary (and inventor of Peychaud bitters) held Masonic social gatherings at his pharmacy, where he mixed brandy toddies with his own bitters and served them in an egg-cup. The drink took the name of the cup, in Eng. cocktay. Cocktail party first attested 1928.
* The beverage was named for a mixed breed horse, known as a "cock-tail" as the beverage, like the horse, was neither strictly spirit nor wine - it was a mixed breed.
* The word could also be a distortion of Latin aqua decocta, meaning "distilled water".
September 17, 2012