"lay eggs" meaning in English

See lay eggs in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Audio: En-au-lay eggs.ogg [Australia] Forms: lays eggs [present, singular, third-person], laying eggs [participle, present], laid eggs [participle, past], laid eggs [past]
Etymology: Variant of lay an egg, using the plural form. Etymology templates: {{m|en|lay an egg}} lay an egg Head templates: {{en-verb|lay<,,laid> eggs}} lay eggs (third-person singular simple present lays eggs, present participle laying eggs, simple past and past participle laid eggs)
  1. (idiomatic) To produce a string of failures or flops. Tags: idiomatic
    Sense id: en-lay_eggs-en-verb-eaV3cRM7 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Download JSON data for lay eggs meaning in English (1.7kB)

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        "2": "lay an egg"
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  "etymology_text": "Variant of lay an egg, using the plural form.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "lays eggs",
      "tags": [
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    {
      "form": "laying eggs",
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    {
      "form": "laid eggs",
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    {
      "form": "laid eggs",
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      "name": "en-verb"
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  "pos": "verb",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1991, Peter Hay, Movie Anecdotes, page 111",
          "text": "Despite his dictum that “when you get a sex story in biblical garb, you can open your own mint,” this particular turkey was laying eggs all over America.",
          "type": "quotation"
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      ],
      "glosses": [
        "To produce a string of failures or flops."
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      "id": "en-lay_eggs-en-verb-eaV3cRM7",
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        "(idiomatic) To produce a string of failures or flops."
      ],
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      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/En-au-lay_eggs.ogg",
      "tags": [
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  "etymology_text": "Variant of lay an egg, using the plural form.",
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          "text": "Despite his dictum that “when you get a sex story in biblical garb, you can open your own mint,” this particular turkey was laying eggs all over America.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
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        "To produce a string of failures or flops."
      ],
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) To produce a string of failures or flops."
      ],
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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.