nest egg
- noun
- /nɛst ɛg/
- Archaic
:
huevo artificial
- We found a glass nest egg in the chicken house, used to guide the hens.
Examples
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The farmer placed a nest egg in the henhouse.
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Without a nest egg, the hens sometimes wander off to lay their eggs elsewhere.
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The farmer placed a nest egg in each coop to make the hens feel more comfortable.
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We need to buy a nest egg for the hens.
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The farmer placed a nest egg in the henhouse to help encourage the hens to lay their eggs in that location.
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To increase her chances of getting eggs, she put a nest egg in the bird's nest.
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After many attempts, she finally succeeded when she used a nest egg to stimulate the hens to lay in the same spot.
Surface Forms
Morphology
nest + egg
The image of eggs kept in a nest suggests something put aside and protected for the future, so a learner who knows 'nest' and 'egg' could plausibly infer a sense of saved/stored resources. However, mapping that image specifically to a sum of money for retirement is a conventionalized metaphor and not fully predictable from the parts without prior exposure, so it is only partially transparent.
Etymology
Nest egg first meant a real or fake egg put into a hen's nest to make hens sit and lay in that spot. Farmers used a nest egg to 'encourage hens', so the phrase names that object.
