"golden egg" meaning in English

See golden egg in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: golden eggs [plural]
Etymology: Allusion to “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs”, one of Aesop’s Fables. Attested from the 18th century. Compare golden goose, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Etymology templates: {{m|en|golden goose}} golden goose, {{m|en|kill the goose that lays the golden eggs}} kill the goose that lays the golden eggs Head templates: {{en-noun}} golden egg (plural golden eggs)
  1. A source of consistent profit or advantage, or the profit gained by such advantage.
    Sense id: en-golden_egg-en-noun-~YGl3EPJ Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 91 9
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see golden, egg.
    Sense id: en-golden_egg-en-noun-RQMIcnMW

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for golden egg meaning in English (3.0kB)

{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "golden goose"
      },
      "expansion": "golden goose",
      "name": "m"
    },
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs"
      },
      "expansion": "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs",
      "name": "m"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "Allusion to “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs”, one of Aesop’s Fables. Attested from the 18th century. Compare golden goose, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "golden eggs",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "golden egg (plural golden eggs)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "_dis": "91 9",
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w+disamb"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1887, Oliver Huckel, “The New Mother Goose”, in The Record. ’87, University of Pennsylvania, page 55",
          "text": "Here’s golden eggs in plenty, why not the Golden Age? —\nThe time the world is waiting, the day-dream of the sage;\n[…]\nThe golden eggs of Eight-Seven, after four years’ incubation,\nShould hatch a brood to scratch the good from out the whole creation,",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1904, “Story of the Jobbers-Broker’s Union”, in Truth Christmas Number, page 28",
          "text": "How certain Stockbrokers, not content with the golden eggs laid for them by a complaisant Goose, attempt to increase the output.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2004, Todd Duncan, Killing the Sale: The 10 Fatal Mistakes Salespeople Make and How To Avoid Them, page 24",
          "text": "The more consistently you bring the same “golden egg” set of factors to a selling effort (integrity, professionalism, and reliability), the more probable a golden-egg outcome remains. On the other hand, with every new pose and posture you add to your bag of selling tricks, a golden-egg outcome becomes less and less probable, or more and more haphazard.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005 October 15, Hattie Klotz, “The golden egg”, in Ottawa Citizen, page I2",
          "text": "With sales about to shoot into the stratosphere and a new office in the works, sleep is relegated to a poor third place. By day, Burgener is setting up the new office and fielding media requests, by night, he sits down to start the real work of programming for his golden egg, 20Q. Burgener’s invention, 20Q, is poised to become the next toy megahit.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A source of consistent profit or advantage, or the profit gained by such advantage."
      ],
      "id": "en-golden_egg-en-noun-~YGl3EPJ",
      "links": [
        [
          "profit",
          "profit"
        ],
        [
          "advantage",
          "advantage"
        ]
      ]
    },
    {
      "glosses": [
        "Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see golden, egg."
      ],
      "id": "en-golden_egg-en-noun-RQMIcnMW",
      "links": [
        [
          "golden",
          "golden#English"
        ],
        [
          "egg",
          "egg#English"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "wikipedia": [
    "Aesop’s Fables",
    "The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs"
  ],
  "word": "golden egg"
}
{
  "categories": [
    "English countable nouns",
    "English entries with incorrect language header",
    "English lemmas",
    "English multiword terms",
    "English nouns"
  ],
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "golden goose"
      },
      "expansion": "golden goose",
      "name": "m"
    },
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs"
      },
      "expansion": "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs",
      "name": "m"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "Allusion to “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs”, one of Aesop’s Fables. Attested from the 18th century. Compare golden goose, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "golden eggs",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "golden egg (plural golden eggs)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1887, Oliver Huckel, “The New Mother Goose”, in The Record. ’87, University of Pennsylvania, page 55",
          "text": "Here’s golden eggs in plenty, why not the Golden Age? —\nThe time the world is waiting, the day-dream of the sage;\n[…]\nThe golden eggs of Eight-Seven, after four years’ incubation,\nShould hatch a brood to scratch the good from out the whole creation,",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1904, “Story of the Jobbers-Broker’s Union”, in Truth Christmas Number, page 28",
          "text": "How certain Stockbrokers, not content with the golden eggs laid for them by a complaisant Goose, attempt to increase the output.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2004, Todd Duncan, Killing the Sale: The 10 Fatal Mistakes Salespeople Make and How To Avoid Them, page 24",
          "text": "The more consistently you bring the same “golden egg” set of factors to a selling effort (integrity, professionalism, and reliability), the more probable a golden-egg outcome remains. On the other hand, with every new pose and posture you add to your bag of selling tricks, a golden-egg outcome becomes less and less probable, or more and more haphazard.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005 October 15, Hattie Klotz, “The golden egg”, in Ottawa Citizen, page I2",
          "text": "With sales about to shoot into the stratosphere and a new office in the works, sleep is relegated to a poor third place. By day, Burgener is setting up the new office and fielding media requests, by night, he sits down to start the real work of programming for his golden egg, 20Q. Burgener’s invention, 20Q, is poised to become the next toy megahit.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A source of consistent profit or advantage, or the profit gained by such advantage."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "profit",
          "profit"
        ],
        [
          "advantage",
          "advantage"
        ]
      ]
    },
    {
      "glosses": [
        "Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see golden, egg."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "golden",
          "golden#English"
        ],
        [
          "egg",
          "egg#English"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "wikipedia": [
    "Aesop’s Fables",
    "The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs"
  ],
  "word": "golden egg"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.