Word.ws English Dictionary

curates' eggs

curates' eggs is the plural of curate's egg.

Meaning of curate's egg

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...

Questions about curates' eggs

What is curates' eggs the plural of?
Curates' eggs is the plural of curate's egg.

Words near curates' eggs in the dictionary

  1. curate
  2. curate's egg
  3. curated
  4. curateless
  5. curates
  6. curates' eggs
  7. curateship
  8. curateships
  9. curatess
  10. curatesses
  11. curatial

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: curates' eggs (page history and authors); 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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