over-egg the pudding

Of English origin.

over-egg the pudding (third-person singular simple present over-eggs the pudding, present participle over-egging the pudding, simple past and past participle over-egged the pudding)

1. (intransitive) To embellish too much; to exaggerate.

   Synonym: gild the lily

   • 1839 September, Nimrod , “A Hunting Tour in the Midland Counties: The Quorn: The Belvoir: And the Cottesmore”, in Craven , 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:

     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.

   • 1845, Robert Smith Surtees, chapter XVI, in Hillingdon Hall, published 1888, page 161:

     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.

   • 1960 June 22, The Earl of Arran, “The Newspapers”, in parliamentary debates (House of Lords)‎, column 471:

     Our established Press bosses are no fools. They know the risks, and they will be careful not to over-egg 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:

     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.

   • 2009, Virginia Ironside, The Virginia Monologues, Penguin UK, →ISBN:

     If you really want to over-egg the pudding, you can, a month or so after the funeral, organize a memorial service.

   • 2010, Alan Bennett, “Introduction”, in The Complete Talking Heads, Picador, →ISBN, page 32:

     Adverbs too ('she remarked, tersely') seem to over-egg the pudding or else acquire undue weight in the mouth of a supposedly artless narrator.

• overegg the pudding

• overegg, over-egg
• over-egged