In William Caxton’s 1490 translation of the “Aeneid” (specifically in the prologue), there is this line:
“Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.”
The line illustrates a controversy of the time: which word was going to be used for the ovoid output of hens, “egg” or “eye”? I suspect you know the outcome.
The controversy stemmed from Old Norse, which contained two different words “egg” — a neuter noun for what we today call an egg, and a feminine noun meaning an edge or a blade. Middle English already had a word for what we call an egg: “eye”. It’s not entirely clear why the Old Norse word “egg” appeared in English in the 1300s, but when it did, the controversy sprang up as well.
English already had another word “egg” of course; the one we use when we refer to “egging someone on”. That “egg” ALSO comes from Old Norse. In this case it comes from “eggja”, which meant “to urge”. It entered English centuries earlier than the other “egg”, thus spoiling any opportunity for a joke about “which came first”.
Not to neglect the other meaning of the Old Norse “egg”; the one that meant “edge” — that entered English too (originally spelled “ecge”), probably before either of the others, as you can find it in “Beowulf” from about 725:
“Breostnet broden Þæt gebearh feore wið ord ond wið ecge ingang forstod” (“The mesh of mail that saved his life stood fast against point and edge”).
English being English, and thus quite amenable to alterations, “edge” began to be used as a verb as well a few centuries later, as sown in the 1297 “Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester:”
“I-egged yt [the sword] ys in on alf” (“I sharpened it on one side”).
The more modern sense of “edge” as “furnishing something with a border” showed up in the 1500s; the first citation in the OED is from a translation of a history book that describes a helment “edged with belles and plates of golde, and vnder euery bell two knobbes of golde.”
And that got us to where we are today, where your breakfast plate might have a decorative edge and you can eye your eggs and toast.
