Chinese whispers

British  

noun

1. 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

2. any situation where information is passed on in turn by a number of people, often becoming distorted in the process

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Example Sentences

Chinese whispers An intriguing post by economist Christopher Balding on his blog, Balding’s World, makes the case against Chinese tech giant Huawei.

From The Guardian • Jan. 25, 2020

They are so fragile, passed down almost through Chinese whispers, and we want to cling to them.

From New York Times • Feb. 15, 2019

This is a good example of internet Chinese whispers.

From The Guardian • Jan. 21, 2018

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

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