Word.ws English Dictionary

double Dutch

/dʌb.əl ˈdʌtʃ/

double Dutch noun: incomprehensible language or speech.

Noun

double Dutch (uncountable)

  1. Incomprehensible language or speech.
    • “Tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about. It’s double Dutch to me.”1920, Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, London: Pan Books, published 1954, page 121
  2. A language game akin to pig Latin.
    Synonyms:
    all Greek to me, gibberish, gobbledygook, nonsense
  3. A game of jump rope with two ropes and frequently two jumpers.
  4. (colloquial) Sex using a condom and the contraceptive pill at the same time.

Synonyms of double Dutch

Origin of double Dutch

From double (“twice, i.e. more than”) + Dutch. For sense 1: Dutch (which historically had a wider meaning) as a foreign language was not easily understood, so anything completely incomprehensible would be double Dutch, i.e. twice as hard as Dutch. Sense 2 expands on this meaning.

Questions about double Dutch

What does double Dutch mean?
Double Dutch means incomprehensible language or speech.
What part of speech is double Dutch?
Double Dutch is a noun.
How do you pronounce double Dutch?
Double Dutch is pronounced /dʌb.əl ˈdʌtʃ/.

Words near double Dutch in the dictionary

  1. double dribbles
  2. double drummer
  3. double drummers
  4. double Ds
  5. double dug
  6. double Dutch
  7. double duties
  8. double duty
  9. double E
  10. double eagle
  11. double eagles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: double Dutch (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 Dutch.ogg.

Cite this entry: “double Dutch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/double_dutch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.