egging

Pluraleggings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of pelting a person, building, or vehicle with eggs, usually as an insult or prank.

   Police investigated the egging of several cars on Halloween night.

   The candidate endured a public egging from protesters outside the hall.

   Note

   Each attack counts as one egging, so the word pluralizes naturally when they pile up. Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin's Tasting Freedom (2010) pairs it with a rougher companion, recalling the man who stood with Douglass "through mobbings and eggings." Used without an article, it names the practice. With an article or in the plural, it names particular incidents.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of egg.

   Some teenagers were egging passing cars from the overpass.

   His friends were egging him on long after he wanted to stop.

   Note

   One spelling covers a wide spread of verbs: pelting with eggs, dipping food in beaten egg before cooking, collecting wild birds' eggs, urging someone on, and even distorting a round tube into an oval. As a gerund it shades into the true nouns, the pelting sense and the egg-gathering sense. Unlike the verb form, those nouns can take a plural: eggings.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The gathering of eggs laid by wild birds, typically by taking them from the birds' nests.

   Seabird egging was banned on the island once the gull colonies began to shrink.

   Coastal communities relied on egging to supplement their diet each spring.

   Note

   The word usually follows the name of the bird whose eggs are taken, as in plover egging or seabird egging. That pattern also keeps it apart from the pelting sense: here the eggs are gathered, not thrown. The matching verb takes no object, so people go egging rather than egg something.

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