Word.ws English Dictionary

broken telephone

broken telephone noun: synonym of Chinese whispers (in either sense).

Noun (1)

broken telephone (uncountable)

  1. Synonym of Chinese whispers (in either sense)
    • The number of attendees remains unconfirmed by Toronto police, the City of Toronto, and Pride Toronto organizers. So how did the media get it wrong? The erroneous news reports were a case of broken telephone that can be traced back to a 2009 estimate, which states that Pride week drew 1,120,000...2011 July 15, Claire Ward, “Raining on the Pride parade”, in Maclean's, Toronto, Ont.: St. Joseph Communications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 06 Jun 2023
    • Our kids are playing the world's most complex game of Broken Telephone. And they will need to know that hearing is not the same thing as listening, especially when we're gossiping with hyperconnected digital tools.2018, Jordan Shapiro, The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World, New York, N.Y. […]: Little, Brown Spark, →ISBN, page 243

Noun (2) capitalized: Broken Telephone

Broken Telephone (uncountable)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of broken telephone.

Synonyms of broken telephone

Forms of broken telephone

alternative formBroken Telephone

Questions about broken telephone

What does broken telephone mean?
Broken telephone means synonym of Chinese whispers (in either sense).
What part of speech is broken telephone?
Broken telephone is a noun.

Words near broken telephone in the dictionary

  1. broken someone's heart
  2. broken source
  3. broken squelch
  4. broken stride
  5. broken tail
  6. broken telephone
  7. broken the back of
  8. broken the bank
  9. broken the cycle
  10. broken the deadlock
  11. broken the fourth wall

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: broken telephone (page history and authors); Broken Telephone (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “broken telephone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/broken_telephone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.