Eager - eagre

There is a common adjective eager, which means 'keen', 'enthusiastic' or 'very willing to participate'. (In Middle English, it usually meant 'sharp' with various unpleasant connotations; in Modern English, the connotations are usually pleasant, and the context is normally living beings, and most often humans.)

Spellcheckers can accept a typing error which confuses eager with a much rarer homophone. This is the noun eagre, which means 'a high wave that rushes up certain rivers at certain conditions of the tide' (also called a tidal bore). Such waves are caused by funnelling the high water of the tide up a narrower and shallower river-bed, so that it becomes a high wave, moving far and fast upstream. The name eagre (sometimes spelled aegir) is particularly applied to the tidal waves of this sort experienced in the Humber Estuary in England, and thus the river Trent.

• An egret on the other hand is a bird of the heron family. There are several different species.