Word.ws English Dictionary

cloak-and-daggery

cloak-and-daggery noun: espionage, secrecy.

Noun

cloak-and-daggery (uncountable)

  1. Espionage, secrecy.
    • [Richard] Moore's climb to the pinnacle of British cloak-and-daggery is a measure of the curious intimacy that sits alongside the ancient enmities that have often described Anglo-Irish relations.2025 August 15, Philip Stephens, “Ireland’s ‘British question’”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 1

Origin of cloak-and-daggery

cloak-and-dagger + -y

Questions about cloak-and-daggery

What does cloak-and-daggery mean?
Cloak-and-daggery means espionage, secrecy.
What part of speech is cloak-and-daggery?
Cloak-and-daggery is a noun.

Words near cloak-and-daggery in the dictionary

  1. cloak fern
  2. cloak ferns
  3. cloak room
  4. cloak rooms
  5. cloak-and-dagger
  6. cloak-and-daggery
  7. cloak-and-sworder
  8. cloak-and-sworders
  9. cloakable
  10. cloaked
  11. cloakedly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cloak-and-daggery (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “cloak-and-daggery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cloak-and-daggery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.