Used about an egg cooked in its shell in boiling water, but only for a short time — long enough for the white to set, while the yolk in the middle stays runny or soft. Roughly four to six minutes, depending on how you like it. You eat a soft-boiled egg out of the shell with a small spoon, often standing in an egg cup, and people dip strips of toast into the yolk. Keep the family straight: soft-boiled (runny yolk), hard-boiled (cooked all the way through, yolk firm and pale), poached (no shell, cooked in the water itself). Write it with the hyphen when it comes before the noun — 'a soft-boiled egg'. Note that 'hard-boiled', its opposite, also describes a tough unemotional person or a type of crime novel; 'soft-boiled' has no such life of its own and is used almost only about eggs.