chicken-and-egg

Also chick·en-or-egg

[chik-uhn-uhn-eg, -uhnd-]

adjective

1. of, relating to, or being a dilemma of which of two things came first or of which is the cause and which the effect.

   a chicken-and-egg question of whether matter or energy is the basis of the universe.

Word History and Origins

Origin of chicken-and-egg¹

First recorded in 1955–60

Example Sentences

This is the chicken-and-egg question: Did people become homeless because they were mentally ill, or did they become mentally ill because of the “harsh existence” of being homeless?

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This is the chicken-and-egg question: Did people become homeless because they were mentally ill, or did they become mentally ill because of the “harsh existence” of being homeless?

Read more on Los Angeles Times

Resolving this chicken-and-egg dilemma, as Dr Kirkham put it, would shed light on how serious the impacts of losing today's Antarctic ice shelves might be.

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Like about a dozen other states that have implemented some form of digital ID, however, California faces what Gordon calls a chicken-and-egg problem: businesses want to see more people adopt digital licenses before they decide to support them, and people want the licenses to be more widely accepted before they bother to sign up for one.

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Business leaders in the early 2000s were painfully aware that downtown L.A. lacked the vibrancy of other big cities because it had so few residents, but was stuck in a chicken-and-egg dilemma: People didn’t want to live there because it lacked restaurants, grocery stores and other typical city-life amenities, but merchants didn’t want to set up shop because few lived there.

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