Dictionary

over-egg the pudding en · VERB

Etymology

Of English origin.

Meanings

1. (intransitive) To embellish too much; to exaggerate.
   • Adverbs too ('she remarked, tersely') seem to over-egg the pudding or else acquire undue weight in the mouth of a supposedly artless narrator. 2010, Alan Bennett, “Introduction”, in The Complete Talking Heads, Picador, →ISBN, page 32:
   • Our established Press bosses are no fools. They know the risks, and they will be careful not to over-egg the pudding. 1960 June 22, The Earl of Arran, “The Newspapers”, in parliamentary debates (House of Lords), column 471:
   • But hard riding men, in strange countries, are apt now and then to over-egg the pudding, as the Yorkshire landlord told his Grace of Cleveland. 1839 September, Nimrod [pseudonym; Charles James Apperley], “A Hunting Tour in the Midland Counties: The Quorn: The Belvoir: And the Cottesmore”, in Craven [pseudonym; John William Carleton], editor, The Sporting Review, a Monthly Chronicle of the Turf, the Chase, and Rural Sports in All Their Varieties, London: Rudolph Ackermann, […], →OCLC, page 187:
   • [M]any British officials, as David Holden deduced from conversations with them in the Crescent bar in the mid-fifties, were 'afflicted with a familiar form of colonial myopia known as localitis' – […] Maybe Holden slightly overeggs the pudding. 1991, Glen Balfour-Paul, “Comparisons, without Odium”, in The End of Empire in the Middle East: Britain’s Relinquishment of Power in Her Last Three Arab Dependencies, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, published 1992, →ISBN, page 162:
   • The toast was drunk with tremendous applause, Mr. Jorrocks acting as fugleman—“but as we mustn't over-egg the pudding,” as the Yorkshire farmers say, we will reserve the other proceedings of the evening for another chapter. 1845, Robert Smith Surtees, chapter XVI, in Hillingdon Hall, published 1888, page 161:
   • If you really want to over-egg the pudding, you can, a month or so after the funeral, organize a memorial service. 2009, Virginia Ironside, The Virginia Monologues, Penguin UK, →ISBN:

Forms

Deriveds

over-egg · over-egged · overegg

Synonyms

gild the lily