double-tongued
double-tongued adjective: saying one thing to one person and something different to another; double talking; deceitful in speech. Also the simple past and past participle of double-tongue.
Adjective
double-tongued (not comparable)
- Saying one thing to one person and something different to another; double talking; deceitful in speech.
- Thou art but a double-tongu'd Chriſtian, I doubt: […]1720, [Daniel Defoe], The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton, London: […] J[ohn] Brotherton, […], J[ohn] Graves […], A[nne] Dodd, […], and T[homas] Warner, […], →OCLC...
- “Thou wry-necked, trash-mongering, swaggering, double-tongued, huff-snuff!”1970, Richard Carpenter, Catweazle, Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, page 123
- Synonyms:
- twi-tongued, two-tongued
Also used as
double-tongued is also the simple past and past participle of double-tongue.
Synonyms of double-tongued
Origin of double-tongued
From Middle English doubultongud, dowbyl townged, dubble tungyd, equivalent to double + tongued.
Questions about double-tongued
- What does double-tongued mean?
- Double-tongued means saying one thing to one person and something different to another; double talking; deceitful in speech.
- What part of speech is double-tongued?
- Double-tongued is an adjective.
Words near double-tongued in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: double-tongued (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-double-tongued.ogg.
Cite this entry: “double-tongued.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/double-tongued. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.