Word.ws English Dictionary

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

/ˌtwiːdəlˈdʌm ən ˌtwiːdəlˈdiː/

Tweedledum and Tweedledee noun: two persons or organizations deemed indistinguishable in some way.

Noun

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  1. (derogatory) Two persons or organizations deemed indistinguishable in some way.
    • The radicals said that Nixon and Humphrey were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
  2. (derogatory) A pair of people who spend a lot of time together, and look and act similarly.
    • Some officers were starting to call Edendale's two detective chief inspectors Tweedledum and Tweedledee, because they were rarely seen except when they were sitting alongside each other at the head of a briefing.2007, Stephen Booth, Blood on the Tongue: A Crime Novel
    • With their apparently identikit backgrounds and bland politicians' patter, the contest has sometimes seemed an incestuous choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. When even the promised fratricidal war between the Miliband brothers failed to take off, one newspaper cartoonist illustrated a...2010 August 25, Seumas Milne, “Ed is the only Miliband who offers a genuine alternative”, in The Guardian online

Origin of Tweedledum and Tweedledee

From Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a pair of identical characters in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Their names may have originally come from an epigram written by poet John Byrom.

Words formed from Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Questions about Tweedledum and Tweedledee

What does Tweedledum and Tweedledee mean?
Tweedledum and Tweedledee means two persons or organizations deemed indistinguishable in some way.
What part of speech is Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
Tweedledum and Tweedledee is a noun.
How do you pronounce Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
Tweedledum and Tweedledee is pronounced /ˌtwiːdəlˈdʌm ən ˌtwiːdəlˈdiː/.

Words near Tweedledum and Tweedledee in the dictionary

  1. Tweedle-dee
  2. Tweedle-dees
  3. Tweedle-dum
  4. Tweedle-dums
  5. tweedled
  6. Tweedledum and Tweedledee
  7. Tweedledum and Tweedledumber
  8. Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber
  9. tweedler
  10. tweedlers
  11. tweedles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Tweedledum and Tweedledee (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.

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