Word.ws English Dictionary

nest egg

nest egg noun: a natural or artificial egg placed in a bird's nest, to encourage the bird to lay its own eggs there.

Noun

nest egg (plural nest eggs)

  1. A natural or artificial egg placed in a bird's nest, to encourage the bird to lay its own eggs there.
    • My improvement relates to artificial eggs composed of a substance which is offensive to insects, the object being to render the same effective, not only as a nest-egg, but also as a destroyer of vermin.1879, Patent No. 211,363, issued Jan. 14, 1879 to O. F. Woodward for a Nest-Egg
  2. (figuratively) A saving; a reserve of money.
    • Over time, they accumulated a tidy nest egg and retired comfortably.
    • When Mrs. Carey was married she had three hundred pounds, and this money, carefully watched, had been used by her to meet any unforeseen expense, any urgent charity, or to buy Christmas and birthday presents for her husband and for Philip. In the course of years it had diminished sadly, but it was...1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXXIX, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC
  3. An egg squash.

nest egg meaning in Malayalam

nest egg in Malayalam

(life) savings, cache, funds
സമ്പാദ്യം, ഭാവിയിലേക്കു സമ്പാദിച്ചുവച്ചിട്ടുള്ള തുക, ജീവിതസമ്പാദ്യം, ആയുഷ്കാലസമ്പാദ്യം, പുറപ്പാട്, മിച്ചമുള്ള വരുമാനം

Examples of nest egg in a sentence

  • He talked of his wife as a rich woman and he constantly spoke of the "nest egg".1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXXIX, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC:
  • I mean, we can drop out and we can still have our nest egg!1985, Albert Brooks, Lost in America (motion picture), spoken by David Howard (Albert Brooks):
  • Last year, Elliot Liebman, a 30-year-old musician in Austin, Texas, began investing part of every paycheck in some of those currencies, hoping to build a nest egg.2022 June 29, David Yaffe-Bellany, “Crypto Crash Widens a Divide: ‘Those With Money Will End Up Being Fine’”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Forms of nest egg

pluralnest eggs

Questions about nest egg

What does nest egg mean?
Nest egg means a natural or artificial egg placed in a bird's nest, to encourage the bird to lay its own eggs there.
What is nest egg in Malayalam?
Nest egg in Malayalam is സമ്പാദ്യം, ഭാവിയിലേക്കു സമ്പാദിച്ചുവച്ചിട്ടുള്ള തുക, ജീവിതസമ്പാദ്യം. See Nest egg meaning in Malayalam.
How do you use nest egg in a sentence?
He talked of his wife as a rich woman and he constantly spoke of the "nest egg".
What part of speech is nest egg?
Nest egg is a noun.
What is the plural of nest egg?
The plural of nest egg is nest eggs.

Words near nest egg in the dictionary

  1. Nessus shirt
  2. Nessus sphinx
  3. nest
  4. nest box
  5. nest boxes
  6. nest egg
  7. nest eggs
  8. nest of vipers
  9. nest scrape
  10. nest scrapes
  11. nest together

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nest egg (page history and authors); nest egg (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-nest egg.ogg.

Cite this entry: “nest egg.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nest_egg. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.