cloak-and-dagger
cloak-and-dagger adjective: marked by menacing furtive secrecy, often with a melodramatic tint or espionage involved.
Adjective
cloak-and-dagger
- Marked by menacing furtive secrecy, often with a melodramatic tint or espionage involved.
- Israel wages cloak-and-dagger war on Iran [headline]2009 February 18, Philip Sherwell, Dina Kraft, “Israel wages cloak-and-dagger war on Iran”, in The Age
- Two years after ordering the mass internment of German refugees at the start of the second world war, the British government put a small, elite group of them in military uniforms and sent them on a secret cloak-and-dagger mission to occupied Dieppe to snatch an Enigma coding machine from under the...2021 May 9, Andrew Gumbel, “Raid on Dieppe masked secret mission to steal Nazis’ Enigma machine”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
- Synonyms:
- covert, clandestine, undercover, abstruse, behind the scenes, catlike, backroom, backstairs, stealth, concealed
cloak-and-dagger meaning in Tamil
cloak-and-dagger in Tamil
- சூழ்ச்சி சதித்திட்டங்களின் தொடர்புடைய
Synonyms of cloak-and-dagger
- covert
- clandestine
- undercover
- abstruse
- behind the scenes
- catlike
- backroom
- backstairs
- stealth
- concealed
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
- confidential
- deep-laid
- dern
- disguised
- furtive
- huggermugger
- hush-hush
- inconspicuous
- incognito
- low profile
- lurksome
- lurky
- mousy
- obfuscated
- off-the-books
- on the down-low
- on the sly
- secret
- secretive
- slinky
- sly
- sneaky
- stealthy
- sub rosa
- surreptitious
- under-the-table
- under the radar
- under wraps
- underground
- unperceived
Origin of cloak-and-dagger
Calque of French de cape et d'épée (“of the cloak and the sword”); first attested 1840. The French term referred to a genre of drama in which the main characters wore cloaks and had swords. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the “cloak and sword” term in 1840, whereas Charles Dickens preferred “cloak and dagger” a year later.
Words formed from cloak-and-dagger
Questions about cloak-and-dagger
- What does cloak-and-dagger mean?
- Cloak-and-dagger means marked by menacing furtive secrecy, often with a melodramatic tint or espionage involved.
- What is cloak-and-dagger in Tamil?
- Cloak-and-dagger in Tamil is சூழ்ச்சி சதித்திட்டங்களின் தொடர்புடைய. See Cloak-and-dagger meaning in Tamil.
- What part of speech is cloak-and-dagger?
- Cloak-and-dagger is an adjective.
Words near cloak-and-dagger in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cloak-and-dagger (page history and authors); cloak-and-dagger (Tamil Wiktionary) (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: “cloak-and-dagger.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cloak-and-dagger. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.