double entendre

plural double entendres · nonstandard plural doubles entendres

1. rhetoricA phrase that has two meanings, especially where one is innocent and literal, the other risqué, bawdy, or ironic; an innuendo.

   (There are no double entendres in France, where the phrase does not exist or make sense.)

   2016 October 13, Matthew Anderson, “The foreign words that seem like English – but aren’t”, in BBC, archived from the original on 14 Nov 2020

   4 more examples

   Avoid all equivocal expressions, usually denominated double entendre; they are certain proofs of a mean and indelicate mind.

   1812, A treatise on politeness, tr. from the French by a lady, page 172

   It is a momentous crusade without the cross; and an insidious one, for the calumnies and double entendre against the church are well wrapped up and keenly distributed.

   1891, Paulist Fathers, Catholic World, page 785

   Churn and stick, and the agitation needed to make the butter, would obviously suggest sexual intercourse, and so the work song becomes an occasion for a series of double entendres in which the dairy maids could tease the men working in the vicinity and thus enact the courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi to make their work sacred.

   1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 171

   It is not only the teacher's play with single words, phrases, and double entendre that are common in my classroom data.

   2000, James P. Lantolf, Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning, page 126