2749: Egg’s Rival Term Jun 30, 2024

The more basic a word is, the older it tends to be in a language. ‘Eggs’ is an interesting case because while it does belong to an old Germanic root, it was not the only word for them in English for a long time,. Another term, ‘ey’, plural eyren (spelt various ways) was used into early Modern English—some people would have used this exclusively and never heard ‘egg’—until it was displaced by the 16th century, though it’s related to the German Ei (plural Eier). Ultimately, ‘egg’ and ‘ey’ are from the same root, and this process of the sounds [g] → [j] is pretty common in English history. There are of course many cases where the [j] won out instead, but here it also shows the process of switching from the older ‘-(r)en’ plural suffix, now only seen in a small set of words like ‘children’, was replaced with the now nearly ubiquitous plural ‘-s’.