Chinese whisper
1
7.5
- noun
- /ˈtʃaɪniːz ˈwɪspə/
- Offensive
:
teléfono roto
- During the party, we played a game of Chinese whisper, and by the end, the message was completely different.
Examples
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As they enjoyed their picnic, they decided to play Chinese whisper, but no one could remember the original phrase.
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We're all playing a game called Scrawl, so it's basically a version of Chinese Whispers or Broken Telephone, which is where I pick up one of these cards.
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The children giggled as they passed the message in Chinese whisper, each whisper changing it a little more.
Surface Forms
Morphology
While 'whisper' clearly denotes quiet speech and may suggest some kind of whispering activity, the critical sense of a message being passed along a line and becoming distorted is not directly conveyed by the modifier 'Chinese', which normally signals origin rather than distortion. The label for this game varies across languages (e.g., 'telephone'/'broken telephone') and carries cultural/historical connotations, so a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words would likely not reliably infer the full, idiomatic meaning without prior exposure.
Etymology
Chinese whisper comes from an old children's game where a short message is whispered along a line of people. As each person hears it only once and repeats it, the words often become mixed up, so the phrase now means a rumour or message that gets 'distorted' as it spreads.