Word.ws English Dictionary

curate's egg

Syllables: cu·rate's eggUK/ˈkjʊəɹətz ˌɛɡ/US/ˈkjʊɹɪtz ˌɛɡ/

curate's egg noun: a thing which has good and bad parts, but is overall spoiled by the bad.

Noun

curate's egg (plural curates' eggs)

  1. (idiomatic) A thing which has good and bad parts, but is overall spoiled by the bad.
    • We cannot say we are uniformly favourably impressed with such portions of the work as we have read. The work strikes us as being rather unequal. Like the curate's egg, parts of it are excellent, but parts provide bad material for assimilation.1902 March 1, “Modern Obstetrics, General and Operative. By W[illiam] A[lexander] Newman Dorland, A.M., M.D.; Assistant Demonstrator of Obstetrics, University of Pennsylvania; Assistant Obstetrician...
    • But what does he give us? A mess of pottage—or a curate's egg, if you prefer that—where fine, descriptive passages in good English, and showing a sensitive nature that appreciates beauty, go cheek by jowl with bad grammar, and casual intimacies such as one would look for in the personal story of a...1915 August, J. E. Patterson, “Sailormen All”, in The Bookman, volume XLVIII, number 287, London: Hodder and Stoughton […], →OCLC, page 150, column 2

Examples of curate's egg in a sentence

  • Like the fabled "curate's egg," it may be good in parts.1936 April 6, [Keith Jacka] Holyoake, “Reserve Bank of New Zealand Amendment Bill”, in New Zealand. Parliamentary Debates. First Session...
  • The neat and tidy temporal ordering is, like the curate's egg, good in parts, but only in some parts.1992, G[ordon] Pask, G[erard] de Zeeuw, “A Succinct Summary of Novel Theories”, in Robert Trappl, editor, Cybernetics and Systems Research...

Forms of curate's egg

pluralcurates' eggs

Origin of curate's egg

From a cartoon by the Franco-British cartoonist and author George Du Maurier (1834–1896) captioned “True Humility” in the 9 November 1895 issue of Punch magazine, in which a bishop says to his mealtime guest, a curate, “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” The timid curate replies, “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!”.

Questions about curate's egg

What does curate's egg mean?
Curate's egg means a thing which has good and bad parts, but is overall spoiled by the bad.
How do you use curate's egg in a sentence?
Like the fabled "curate's egg," it may be good in parts.
What part of speech is curate's egg?
Curate's egg is a noun.
How do you pronounce curate's egg?
Curate's egg is pronounced /ˈkjʊəɹətz ˌɛɡ/ (UK).
What is the plural of curate's egg?
The plural of curate's egg is curates' eggs.

Words near curate's egg in the dictionary

  1. curatability
  2. curatable
  3. curatage
  4. curatages
  5. curate
  6. curate's egg
  7. curated
  8. curateless
  9. curates
  10. curates' eggs
  11. curateship

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: curate's egg (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-curate's egg.ogg.

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