Talk:fried egg

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This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Just as with boiled egg above, not in the four reliable dictionaries I've checked (AHD, Collins, Encarta, Merriam-Webster), and no more than the sum of its parts: an egg which has been fried. The same would apply to cracked egg, beaten egg, raw egg, hen's egg, duck egg, crocodile egg, quail egg, partridge egg, platypus egg etc etc ad infinitum. But not to Easter egg or scrambled eggs since they are not obvious and do have entries in all or some of the above dictionaries. It's time to decide what path to take. — Hippietrail 00:33, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Odd, I always thought a fried egg was the internals of an egg that had been fried. Not merely an egg which has been fried, as the shell is explicitly excluded (unlike a boiled egg which is a boiled egg whether or not it has been shelled). Getting to a fried egg from the constituent words of the phrase "fried egg" takes knowledge of our culture and habits of cooking. —Muke Tever 06:27, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

When a person says to you "I think I'll have eggs for breakfast", you must therefore expect them to be eating the shell also?! The sense in the transparent phrase fried egg comes closest to our sense #4 but we specifically state that as uncountable which may need improving. It is also M-W's sense 1a (after "also"). AHD doesn't cover the sense for the contents only. — Hippietrail 16:12, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually having eggs for breakfast is like having peanuts or a watermelon: one takes the whole item for their repast but discards the shell in the process of preparation and eating. In any case, as per below fried egg refers to a specific manner of frying eggs, and if one ordered a fried egg in a restaurant one would expect to get that kind of fried egg, not an egg fried in any other manner. This debate reminds me of a Peanuts Easter cartoon, in which someone was asked to make boiled eggs for coloring, but, unfamiliar with the process, cracked the eggs and boiled the contents instead. The resulting soup was unsatisfactory, because while boiled egg in the literal sense, was not boiled egg in the idiomatic sense. —Muke Tever 17:34, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Appending to that comment: son-in-law egg is a kind of egg that, while fried, is probably not what one would refer to as a fried egg, because "fried egg" refers to a specific kind of fried egg and this ain't it. —Muke Tever 06:50, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Muke here. At passover, one eats roasted eggs, which have been roasted in the shell, and might easily be mistaken for fried eggs by a non-native speaker. Or put another way, a non-native speaker might easily think fried egg meant something like a roasted egg. For that matter, scrambled eggs are fried eggs, literally, but if someone asks for fried eggs and I give them scrambled, they're likely to be disappointed.

This is a general issue with the "sum of the parts" criterion. It's not enough to say that the meaning of a phrase is consistent with the meanings of its parts (as is the case for fried egg but not for the classic red herring). A phrase is also idiomatic if it is inconsistent with some reasonable interpretation of the parts together. Unfortunately, I don't know how to make this more rigorous, and language is slippery in such cases. But generally, a quail egg is the egg of a quail, whether it's in the nest, on the ground, in a museum, fried, scrambled, poached or whatnot. A fried egg, by contrast, is not an egg that has been fried in any way at all. -dmh 15:09, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Delete. Again, if you can look up each word separately and understand what it means, a separate entry is not needed for both words together.--shark 01:35, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Keep - no problem - Παρατηρητής 11:45, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Benefit of doubt applied for keeping. "Fried" and "boiled" are the two ways of preparing eggs which might seem most obvious, and probably the only ones where this question would come up seriously. Eclecticology 19:48, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

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wheelchair basketball

The 2012 Olympics make(s) me realise that wheelchair basketball is some kind of fried egg. It's clearly basketball played in wheelchairs, but oh! it has its own slightly different set of rules. Equinox ◑ 21:30, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

"with an unbroken yolk"

Really? If the yolk breaks during cooking is it not a fried egg any more? If not, what is it? BigDom (t • c) 09:14, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Good spot. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:30, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

I was thinking the same thing a few days ago. I've known people who specifically want the yolks broken, people who want the yolk side booked but not broken, and people who want their fried eggs cooked on one side only. They're all still fried eggs. — hippietrail (talk) 06:33, 16 December 2013 (UTC)