Meaning
A decent, kind, dependable person - someone likeable and trustworthy; a good fellow. It also worked as an exclamation of approval ('Good egg!'). Warm and a little old-fashioned, now often used with knowing, nostalgic charm; it reads as dated mid-century British slang but survives happily in informal American use. Warm and nostalgic rather than neutral; sounds mid-century British or affectionately retro American. Regional use: General English (British origin).
Origin
Recorded from about 1900 as British public-school and university slang - A Way with Words places its early use probably at Oxford - and from the start it was a humorous inversion of the older 'bad egg', figurative from 1855. Rudyard Kipling's Traffics and Discoveries (1904) is the earliest literary use usually cited, and P. G. Wodehouse, who would have absorbed it at Dulwich College in the 1890s, did most to popularize it, using it from Something Fresh (1915) onward (World Wide Words). Michael Quinion calls it a classic of dated slang that survives mainly as a self-conscious archaism of a class-bound Britishness, though it remains in natural, affectionate use, especially in American English.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- good egg
- Good egg!
- good eggs
Usage Examples
- Our landlord is a good egg; he came out on Christmas Eve to fix the boiler.
- You drove my mother to all those appointments? You are a good egg, Marcus.
- The club's new treasurer turned out to be a good egg, staying late to untangle years of records.