Chinese whispers
Britishnoun
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a game in which a message is passed on, in a whisper, by each of a number of people, so that the final version of the message is often radically changed from the original
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any situation where information is passed on in turn by a number of people, often becoming distorted in the process
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
They are so fragile, passed down almost through Chinese whispers, and we want to cling to them.
From New York Times • Feb. 15, 2019
I like Batra’s description of his film as a set of interpretations; like a game of Chinese whispers in which the original message takes on different meanings as it passes down the line.
From The Guardian • Apr. 1, 2017
A strange case of Chinese whispers emerged: the journalist Dylan Jones wrote that that band had written a song on the subject when they hadn’t – so then they did.
From The Guardian • Mar. 29, 2017
This single line, mutated via Chinese whispers into a cast-iron vow to emigrate if Labour won, proved disastrous.
From The Guardian • Feb. 11, 2016
In this they are quite unlike testimonies, which degrade as they pass from ear to ear in an endless game of Chinese whispers; eighteenth-century probability theorists actually devised formulae for calculating this rate of degradation.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
