Word.ws English Dictionary

double talk

double talk noun: doublespeak.

Noun

double talk (uncountable)

  1. Doublespeak.
    • "Frammis on the Antispode": The doubletalk heading this paragraph takes the sting out of Mr. Ruark's comment, even if his gay colored foulard Sinatra bow tie didn't contradict his comment[.]1947, Men's Wear, volume 114, page 90, column 1
  2. Lies, especially in a formal political statement.
  3. Speech which combines English (or some other language) and native-sounding gibberish for humorous effect.
    • [Sid] Caesar's vaudeville format included burlesques—in the nineteenth-century meaning of parody—featuring silent-film and film noir send-ups; Italian opera produced in Caesar's ad-libbed, faux-Italian double-talk;[…]2014, Rick DesRochers, The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 15
  4. A simple phonetic code with a regular infix that makes meaningful speech sound unintelligible.
  5. A situation when two people talk at the same time, causing overlapping audio signals.

Synonyms of double talk

Forms of double talk

alternative formdouble-talk
alternative formdoubletalk

Origin of double talk

From double + talk. Compare Middle English twispeche, Old English twīspǣċ, twīsprǣċ.

Words formed from double talk

Questions about double talk

What does double talk mean?
Double talk means doublespeak.
What part of speech is double talk?
Double talk is a noun.

Words near double talk in the dictionary

  1. double tackles
  2. double take
  3. double taker
  4. double takers
  5. double takes
  6. double talk
  7. double talker
  8. double talkers
  9. double tap
  10. double tapped
  11. double tapping

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: double talk (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 talk.ogg.

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