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Allin

eager

adjectiveverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈiːɡə//
  • United States//ˈiɡɚ//
  • United States//ˈɪɡɚ//
  • United States//ˈɪɡə//

Desirous; keen to do or obtain something.

adjective

  1. 1

    Desirous; keen to do or obtain something.

    Stacey is very eager to go cycling this weekend.

    The hounds were eager in the chase.

    I was eager to show my teacher how much I'd learned over the holidays.

    You stayed up all night to get to the front of the queue. You must be very eager to get tickets.

  2. 2

    Not employing lazy evaluation; calculating results immediately, rather than deferring calculation until they are required.

    an eager algorithm

  3. 3

    datedBrittle; inflexible; not ductile.

    gold itself will be sometimes so eager, (as artists call it), that it will as little endure the hammer as glass itself

  4. 4

    obsoleteSharp; sour; acid.

    like eager droppings into milk

  5. 5

    figurativeSharp; keen; bitter; severe.

    If so thou thinkest, vex him with eager words.

    It is a nipping and an eager air.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂eḱ- Proto-Indo-European *-rós Proto-Indo-European *h₂eḱrós Proto-Italic *akris Classical Latin ācer Late Latin ācrus Old French aigrebor. Middle English egre English eager Inherited from Middle English egre, eger, from Old French aigre, egre (modern French aigre), from Latin ācrus, variant of ācer (“sharp, keen”); see acid, acerb, etc. Compare vinegar, alegar.

verb

  1. 1

    To be or become eager.

    Now everybody considered it a high privilege (valued it at a high consideration) to see him and to hear him speak, and to obey his command (him commanding), whereas he, though being such a person, eagered to be unknown, and to escape notice in solitude.

    Our spirits fret and chafe like sea waves on the rocks eagering to climb the shore.

    The buggy jolted on, the stout, wellkept team eagering, homing, barning.

    After entering college, I eagered to have a parttime job.

  2. 2

    To express eagerness.

    His hair crinkled towards her fondly. "Yes," he eagered.

    Peg! eager voices eagered voicely.

    […] Sister Clare saying Oh look a greenfinch and the name was a gift to me as much as the three and a half more minutes the green vision danced and fretted and eagered and preened in front of me […]

  3. 3

    To make or encourage to be eager

    Physicians also admit to eagering patients to turn to specialised web sites in order to read further.

    But they only eagered him to be off .

    Its presence gave him no thought of condemnation, but only eagered his longing for the redemption body.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of eagreAlternative form of eagre (“tidal bor”).

Etymology

See eagre.

Forms

plural
eagers
comparative
more eager, eagerer
superlative
most eager, eagerest
past tense
eagered
past participle
eagered
present participle
eagering
third person singular
eagers
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).