Chinese whispers
noun phrase

- a children's game in which a sentence is whispered from one person to another and changes as it is passed along.

- a situation in which information changes and becomes less accurate each time it is repeated.

- a game illustrating how messages become altered during repeated transmission.

Cambridge Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, Oxford Reference

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PHRASE ORIGIN

The Chinese whispers game is much older than its English name.

Children have played versions of it across Europe for centuries. The earliest English names included Russian scandal, Russian gossip, and several other national labels before Chinese whispers became common in Britain during the twentieth century. The first recorded evidence for the modern name dates from the 1960s.

Several explanations have been proposed about why Chinese became attached to the phrase.. One links it to nineteenth-century European stereotypes that Chinese speech sounded mysterious or impossible for outsiders to understand. Another suggests a misunderstanding of how messages might once have been relayed over long distances in China. None of these explanations has been conclusively proved.

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THE SOUND OF STRANGERS

Russian is supposedly harsh. Italian sings. French is romantic. Danish, according to many Scandinavians, sounds as though someone is speaking with a potato in their mouth.

These descriptions usually tell us less about the language than about the listener.

When we don't understand a language, our brains stop hearing words and start hearing noise. That's why English has long had expressions like *it's all Greek to me* and *double Dutch* for something impossible to understand. *Chinese whispers* probably grew from the same habit: treating an unfamiliar language as confusing or unintelligible.

The odd thing is how quickly that changes. When we spend a little time in another country what first sounded like an endless blur begins to break into words and sentences. The language hasn't changed. Our ears have.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

broken telephone, CHINESE WHISPERS, garbled communication, hearsay, message distortion, misreporting, misrepresentation, mistransmission, miscommunication, passed-along rumour, rumour chain, Russian gossip, secondhand account, telephone game, whisper down the lane, word-of-mouth distortion

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“Games like CHINESE WHISPERS are a fun way to sensitise kids to the dangers of message relay.”

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