Word of the day: yegg

A yegg is a thief -- more specifically, a safecracker. According to the OED, the word first appeared in the language in 1903, and may have come from a surname. The American Heritage Dictionary lists its origin as unknown.

I remember being mystified by yegg when I first read it in a collection of Dashiell Hammett stories called The Continental Op. The book gathers a few of the many stories Hammett wrote featuring the Op, an employee of the Continental Detective Agency.

The stories are full of yeggs and ex-yeggs. When I finally put down the book and picked up the dictionary, I was suprised to learn what yegg actually means. Why? Well, it's a tough-guy word, but it doesn't sound tough at all. For one thing, it brings to mind eggs. Yegg makes me think of egg, and -- in connection with people -- there's a suggestion that someone might be a good egg (there's another obsolete expression -- how many people ever run across a bad egg anymore?). Despite the hard g sound at the end of yegg, the y slides easily into the soft e sound and comes to an abrupt halt. Call someone a yegg and I'd think it sounds like you're insulting them. Clearly, it wasn't always this way. There it is peppering some of the toughest fiction by one of the toughest writers.

I wonder how long-lived yegg was. Did it survive much past the end of the Depression? A good dictionary gives the first reference to a word, if it can. It would be helpful to try and figure out last references too.