Meaning
To risk everything on a single venture, so that one failure would be catastrophic. It occurs overwhelmingly in the negative warning 'don't put all your eggs in one basket', advising that money, effort, or hopes be spread across several options rather than concentrated in one. Neutral, proverbial register; heard in financial advice, planning, and everyday caution, nearly always as a warning. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The metaphor is plain farmyard arithmetic: drop the one basket and the whole clutch is lost. The best-documented early appearance is in Cervantes' Don Quixote, Part I (1605), where Sancho Panza remarks that 'it is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not to venture all his eggs in one basket'; proverb historians such as Haynes Barker treat Cervantes as the coiner in print, though the underlying farm wisdom may be older. Dictionary.com dates the established English set phrase to 1710 and notes that it largely replaced the older proverb 'trust all one's goods to one ship'. Mark Twain famously inverted it in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) with 'Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket!', a line often misattributed to Andrew Carnegie. The saying is now the standard popular shorthand for diversification, in finance and beyond.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- eggs in one basket
- have all your eggs in one basket
- put all one's eggs in one basket
Usage Examples
- Investors were warned not to put all their eggs in one basket, however promising the startup looked.
- By applying to a single university she had put all her eggs in one basket, and was left scrambling when the rejection came.
- The region's economy has all its eggs in one basket: if the mine closes, everything else closes with it.