double-entendre

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for double entendre is 15 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dubl ɑ̃tɑ̃ːdɹ/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A phrase that has two meanings, especially where one is innocent and literal, the other risqué, bawdy, or ironic; an innuendo.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for double entendre in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: According to Merriam-Webster and OED, from rare and obsolete French double entendre, which literally meant "double meaning" and was used in the senses of "double understanding" or "ambiguity", but acquired its current suggestive twist after being first used… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is double entendre, spelled D-O-U-B-L-E- -E-N-T-E-N-D-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.