goose egg

Thân thiện

The team's scoreboard showed a goose egg at halftime.

Definition

Noun: 1. Zero, nothing, a score of zero: The term "goose egg" is an informal and often humorous way to refer to the number zero, especially in the context of a score or total. 2. A complete absence or lack of something: It can also signify a total lack of quantity, result, or success.

Usage

"Goose egg" is primarily used in informal American English. It is most common in sports contexts to describe a team's score of zero, but it can be used in any situation where the result is nil. - It functions as a countable noun (e.g., a goose egg, two goose eggs).

Examples

• In Sports:
  • The home team was shut out, finishing the game with a big goose egg on the scoreboard.
  • The pitcher's amazing performance left the opponents with a goose egg.
• In General Contexts:
  • After hours of searching, I found a goose egg—no useful information at all.
  • His investment returned a goose egg; he lost everything.

Advanced Usage

• "to lay a goose egg": This phrasal expression means to fail to score or to achieve nothing.
  • The star player laid a goose egg in the championship game, missing every shot.

Variants and Related Words

• Zilch (n): Informal synonym for nothing.
• Nil (n): Often used in British English, especially in sports scores.
• Nada (n): Informal, from Spanish, meaning nothing.
• Zero (n): The standard, formal term.

Synonyms

• Nothing
• Naught (or Nought)
• Zip
• A big fat zero (emphatic informal phrase)

Related Idioms

• Goose egg itself is considered an idiomatic expression for zero. Its origin is attributed to the visual resemblance of the numeral '0' to the shape of a goose's egg.

Học thuật

Noun

1. a quantity of no importance
   • it looked like nothing I had ever seen before
   • reduced to nil all the work we had done
   • we racked up a pathetic goose egg
   • it was all for naught
   • I didn't hear zilch about it