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a curate's egg

phrase/ə ˈkjʊərəts eɡ/

C2CEFR level
80/100Rarity: very rare
NeutralRegister

Something that is partly good and partly bad, so that it is difficult to judge as a whole.

The reviewer called the exhibition a curate's egg, brilliant in places and dull in others.

Topic: Idioms & phrasal verbs in General English

Rarity runs from 0 (a word everyone knows) to 100 (almost never seen outside specialist or literary writing). Level is the word's real difficulty on the CEFR scale, from A1 to C2.

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