English · Idiom Candidate

walk on eggshells

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

to act very carefully to avoid offending or upsetting someone

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

hành động rất cẩn thận để tránh xúc phạm hoặc làm ai đó buồn

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: to walk on fragile eggshells without breaking them

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

' One look from those eyes when someone had displeased him and we'd all be walking around on eggshells.

His air of tetchy, meticulous perfectionism, which encourages those around him to walk on eggshells, percolates through the entire Really Useful organisation.

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.

Common questions

What does “walk on eggshells” mean?

to act very carefully to avoid offending or upsetting someone Literally: to walk on fragile eggshells without breaking them

Is “walk on eggshells” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.