Word.ws English Dictionary

single entendre

single entendre noun: a phrase that has a single, often bawdy, meaning and is lacking in subtlety or cleverness.

Noun

single entendre (plural single entendres)

  1. (humorous, rhetoric) A phrase that has a single, often bawdy, meaning and is lacking in subtlety or cleverness.
    • She unintentionally wrote single entendre: a lyric about a dinner menu.1985, Sheila Davis, The Craft of Lyric Writing, page 273
    • Larry: Man, Oz, I would love to get me some of that Buffy and Willow action, if you know what I mean.
      Oz: Good job, Larry. You've really mastered the single entendre.1998, Rob Des Hotel, Dean Batali, “Phases”, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Examples of single entendre in a sentence

  • In truth Mae West didn't utter many double entendres; her specialty was the single entendre, the blunt come-on and right-between-the-eyes proposition.1999, Thomas Patrick Doherty, Pre-code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, page 182:
  • I told him once he's so shallow that the best he can manage is a single entendre.2004, Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram, page 58:

Forms of single entendre

pluralsingle entendres

Origin of single entendre

Pseudo-Gallicism. Based on double entendre.

Questions about single entendre

What does single entendre mean?
Single entendre means a phrase that has a single, often bawdy, meaning and is lacking in subtlety or cleverness.
How do you use single entendre in a sentence?
In truth Mae West didn't utter many double entendres; her specialty was the single entendre, the blunt come-on and right-between-the-eyes proposition.
What part of speech is single entendre?
Single entendre is a noun.
What is the plural of single entendre?
The plural of single entendre is single entendres.

Words near single entendre in the dictionary

  1. single curve
  2. single curves
  3. single data rate
  4. single dispatch
  5. single dispatches
  6. single entendre
  7. single entendres
  8. single eyelid
  9. single eyelids
  10. single father
  11. single fathers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: single entendre (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: “single entendre.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/single_entendre. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.