Double Entendre
Quick answer: A double entendre is a phrase with two meanings, one innocent and one risqué or hidden. Learn how poets craft doubleness that rewards a second reading.
A double entendre is a word or phrase deliberately open to two interpretations, where one meaning is innocent and the other is risqué, ironic or otherwise hidden. The term is pseudo-French (modern French says 'double sens'), and English has used it since the seventeenth century for lines that let a speaker say the unsayable while keeping a straight face. The surface meaning gives cover; the second meaning gives the charge.
Poets and songwriters prize the device because it makes the reader an accomplice. Nothing improper is stated, so the audience must supply the second meaning themselves, and the moment they do, they are implicated in the joke. Blues lyrics, music hall songs, Shakespearean banter and courtly love poetry all run on this contract between a clean surface and a knowing listener.
How It Works
A double entendre needs a pivot: a word or image with two live senses, plus a context that quietly activates the second sense while the sentence officially supports only the first. Puns, innuendo-laden metaphors and everyday idioms all serve. Above all, the line must survive its innocent reading, because if the surface meaning is nonsense, the cover is blown and the device collapses into mere crudeness.
A tame invented example: a gardening poem in which the speaker tells a neighbour 'my beds need turning over more often than yours'. Horticulture on the surface, something else underneath, and the sentence works as pure gardening if challenged.
Where You Will See It
Shakespeare's comedies are stuffed with double meanings, with characters like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet turning nearly every line into innuendo, and the sonnets on the poet's own name 'Will' play across several senses at once. The blues tradition perfected coded doubleness, with songs about jelly rolls, handymen and kitchen tasks meaning exactly what the singer's grin implied. Restoration comedy, Victorian music hall and modern pop lyrics carry the line forward, and censorship has always been the device's best publicist, since forbidding plain speech breeds ingenious doubleness.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Build the innocent reading first and make it genuinely good, since a double entendre is only as strong as its cover story. Choose pivot words whose second sense arrives by inference, not by force, and trust readers to catch it; explaining the joke kills it twice. The device also has serious uses beyond the risqué: political poets writing under censorship have hidden second meanings inside pastoral imagery, and love poems often let an ordinary domestic image carry a private meaning between two people. Doubleness of any kind rewards rereading, which is exactly what you want a contest judge doing with your entry.
What poets can take from this
- Make the innocent surface reading complete and satisfying on its own.
- Choose pivots whose second sense readers reach by inference, never by explanation.
- Keep deniability: if the line cannot be defended as its surface meaning, it is not a double entendre.
- Use context, title and neighbouring images to prime the hidden sense quietly.
- Remember the serious uses: coded protest and private address, not only innuendo.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a household task, kneading dough, jump-starting a car, pruning roses, that reads as a faithful account of the task and, on second reading, as something else entirely. Every line must survive both readings.
Questions
What is the difference between a double entendre and a pun?
A pun is any play on two meanings or similar sounds, and both meanings are usually offered openly for the pleasure of the collision. A double entendre keeps one meaning covert, typically risqué or subversive, beneath an innocent surface. Many double entendres use puns as their mechanism.
Does a double entendre have to be rude?
No. The classic examples are risqué, but the structure, an innocent surface with a hidden second sense, also serves political allegory, coded love poems and dramatic irony. What defines the device is concealed doubleness, not the content of the hidden meaning.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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