egg on one's face, to have/wipe off the
have egg on one's face
Fig. to be embarrassed by something one has done. (As if one went out in public with a dirty face.) I was completely wrong, and now I have egg on my face. She's really got egg on her face!
See also: egg, face, have, on
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
egg on one's face, to have/wipe off the
To have made a fool of oneself. An Americanism of the mid-twentieth century, this self-evident metaphor for having made a mess of oneself soon crossed the Atlantic. (John Ciardi, however, speculates it may derive from an entertainer’s being pelted with garbage, including raw eggs, by a dissatisfied audience.) The other version, to wipe the egg off one’s face, means the same thing, implying that one has made an embarrassing error (not that one is correcting it). See also lay an egg.
See also: egg, have, off, on, wipe
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer
- lay an egg
- lay an egg, to
- (one's) face is like thunder
- butter face
- butterface
- cackleberry
- be in (one's) face
- be as white as a sheet
- a face like thunder
- be (as) white as snow