Shakespeare frequently used double entendres in his plays. The title of Sir Thomas More's 1516 fictional work Utopia is a double entendre because of the pun between two Greek-derived words that would have identical pronunciation: with his spelling, it means 'no place' ) spelled as the rare word 'Eutopia', it is pronounced the same by English-speaking readers, but has the meaning 'good place'. These include her use of the word 'queynte' to describe both domestic duties (from the homonym 'quaint') and genitalia ('queynte' being the root of ' cunt', a vulgar English word for vulva).

Įxamples of sexual innuendo and double-entendre occur in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (14th century), in which the Wife of Bath's Tale is laden with double entendres.

Her eye will be wet.') which suggests the answer 'a penis' but has the correct answer 'an onion'. She will soon feel the effect of her encounter with me, this curl-locked woman who squeezes me.

She assaults my red self and seizes my head and clenches me in a cramped place. Sometimes a countryman's quite comely daughter will venture, bumptious girl, to get a grip on me. My stem is erect and tall––I stand up in bed––and whiskery somewhere down below. I harm no city-dweller excepting my slayer alone. Some riddles were double-entendres, such as Riddle 25 ('I am a wondrous creature: to women a thing of joyful expectation, to close-lying companions serviceable. The Anglo-Saxons did not reveal the answers to the riddles, but they have been answered by scholars over the years. In addition to the various poems and stories found in the book, there are also numerous riddles. Some of the earliest double entendres are found in the Exeter Book, or Codex exoniensis, at Exeter Cathedral in England. The first page of the poem 'The Wanderer' found in the Exeter Book. When Odysseus attacks the Cyclops later that night and stabs him in the eye, the Cyclops runs out of his cave, yelling to the other Cyclopes that 'No-one has hurt me!', which leads the other Cyclopes to take no action under the assumption that Polyphemus blinded himself by accident, allowing Odysseus and his men to escape.

In Homer's The Odyssey, when Odysseus is captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus, he tells the Cyclops that his name is Oudeis (ουδεις = No-one). Innuendo is often used in sitcoms and other comedy where some in the audience may enjoy the humour while being oblivious to its secondary meaning.Ī triple entendre is a phrase that can be understood in any of three ways, such as in the back cover of the 1981 Rush album Moving Pictures which shows a moving company carrying paintings out of a building while people are shown being emotionally moved and a film crew makes a ' moving picture' of the whole scene. Structure Ī person who is unfamiliar with the hidden or alternative meaning of a sentence may fail to detect its innuendos, aside from observing that others find it humorous for no apparent reason. No exact equivalent exists in French, whose similar expressions ( mot/expression à) double entente and ( mot/expression à) double sens don't have the suggestiveness of the English expression. The phrase has not been used in French for centuries and would be ungrammatical in modern French. According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression comes from the rare and obsolete French expression, which literally meant 'double meaning' and was used in the senses of 'double understanding' or 'ambiguity' but acquired its current suggestive twist in English after being first used in 1673 by John Dryden.

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