A double entendre (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially awkward, sexually suggestive, or offensive to state directly.
A double entendre may exploit puns or word play to convey the second meaning. Double entendres generally rely on multiple meanings of words, or different interpretations of the same primary meaning. They often exploit ambiguity and may be used to introduce it deliberately in a text. Sometimes a homophone can be used as a pun. When three or more meanings have been constructed, this is known as a "triple entendre", etc.
Etymology
According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression comes from the rare and obsolete French expression, which literally meant "double meaning" and was used in the senses of "double understanding" or "ambiguity" but acquired its current suggestive twist in English after being first used in 1673 by John Dryden. The phrase has not been used in French for centuries and would be ungrammatical in modern French. No exact equivalent exists in French, whose similar expressions (mot/expression à) double entente and (mot/expression à) double sens do not have the suggestiveness of the English expression.
Structure
A person who is unfamiliar with the hidden or alternative meaning of a sentence may fail to detect its innuendos, aside from observing that others find it humorous for no apparent reason. Innuendo is often used in sitcoms and other comedy where some in the audience may enjoy the humour while being oblivious to its secondary meaning.
A triple entendre is a phrase that can be understood in any of three ways, such as in the back cover of the 1981 Rush album Moving Pictures which shows a moving company carrying paintings out of a building while people are shown being emotionally moved and a film crew makes a "moving picture" of the whole scene.
Usage
Literature
In Homer's The Odyssey, when Odysseus is captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus, he tells the Cyclops that his name is Oudeis (ουδεις = No-one). When Odysseus attacks the Cyclops later that night and stabs him in the eye, the Cyclops runs out of his cave, yelling to the other Cyclopes that "No-one has hurt me!", which leads the other Cyclopes to take no action under the assumption that Polyphemus blinded himself by accident, allowing Odysseus and his men to escape.
Some of the earliest double entendres are found in the Exeter Book, or Codex exoniensis, at Exeter Cathedral in England. The book was copied around AD 975. In addition to the various poems and stories found in the book, there are also numerous riddles. The Anglo-Saxons did not reveal the answers to the riddles, but they have been answered by scholars over the years. Some riddles were double-entendres, such as Riddle 25 ("I am a wondrous creature: to women a thing of joyful expectation, to close-lying companions serviceable. I harm no city-dweller excepting my slayer alone. My stem is erect and tall––I stand up in bed––and whiskery somewhere down below. Sometimes a countryman's quite comely daughter will venture, bumptious girl, to get a grip on me. She assaults my red self and seizes my head and clenches me in a cramped place. She will soon feel the effect of her encounter with me, this curl-locked woman who squeezes me. Her eye will be wet.") which suggests the answer "a penis" but has the correct answer "an onion".
Examples of sexual innuendo and double-entendre occur in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (14th century), in which the Wife of Bath's Tale is laden with double entendres. These include her use of the word "queynte" to describe both domestic duties (from the homonym "quaint") and genitalia ("queynte" being the root of "cunt", a vulgar English word for vulva).
The title of Sir Thomas More's 1516 fictional work Utopia is a double entendre because of the pun between two Greek-derived words that would have identical pronunciation: with his spelling, it means "no place"); spelled as the rare word "Eutopia", it is pronounced the same by English-speaking readers, but has the meaning "good place".