Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's not redundant at all. The word "entendre" means "intent"; "double entendre" is a word or phrase with two intents.
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Genuine thanks for the correction. I knew that if the meaning that I stated was correct, a multitude of people didn't know it. But that has happened before.
Let me tell you what happened, so I'm not thought to be as ignorant as it seems. The program had flagged the spelling "entendre" as being incorrect. I was almost sure that I was correct--it is a French word, and I had 3 years of French total in both high school and college. I've forgotten about everything that I learned about the language, but I thought that I did still retain a knowledge of how to spell French words phonetically.
But, I went to Dictionary.com's
Chrome extension bookmark on my bookmark bar to do a quick check of the spelling anyway, and read this:
"entendre[ duhb-uhl ahn-tahn-druh, -tahnd; French doo-blahn-tahn-druh]
noun [plural dou·ble en·ten·dres]
1. a double meaning.
2. a word or expression used in a given context so that it can be understood in two ways, especially when one meaning is risqué."
Note that the entry word is "entendre," not "double entendre." As usual I skipped over the pronunciation and plural meaning, and went right to the definitions. Definition number "1" says, "a double meaning." Number "2" also indicates that it involves a double meaning. If I had read the pronunciation and noted the plural meaning given by Dictionary.com's Chrome extension, there would have been doubt in my mind about whether or not the definitions were for "entendre." But I didn't do that at the time. So, I assumed that I must have been wrong about what I thought that the definition of "entendre" was!
There is a discrepancy between the Dictionary.com extension's entry and the Dictionary.com's
website entry. I didn't check the Dictionary.com website earlier, but if I had, I would have seen for the search term "entendre" an entry for "double entendre" instead. After the entry word, I believe that everything may be the same for the Chrome extension version as it is for the Dictionary.com website version. The definitions given on the Dictionary.com website for "double entendre" are correct for "double entendre."
I can see now that I will have to be more careful in using the Dictionary.com extension (for Chrome, anyway) from now on. I would advise anyone else who uses it to be careful, too.