double duty

English

Noun

double duty (plural double duties)

  1. The performance of two roles simultaneously.
    • 2006 March 23, Dean Zimmerman, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 2, OUP Oxford, →ISBN, page 22:
      But if a token phenomenal feel does double duty in this way (as a token of an aspect of both the pain and our way of thinking of the pain), no extra specter of dualism arises.
  2. (crosswording) A cryptic device or cluing error whereby a term forms part of both the definition and the wordplay.
    • 1986 10, “Spy”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), page 61:
      I find this anagram fascinating, a message from the god of language. Mess serves double duty here, as synonym and as anagram tip-off.
    • 2015 January 1, B. J. Holmes, Pocket Crossword Dictionary, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN:
      "working" here does double duty as an anagram indicator and as a main constituent of the definition.
    • 2020 March 2, Alan Connor, “Crossword roundup: when 'coquettes' were male”, in The Guardian‎[1]:
      Dunnart is undoubtedly audacious in suggesting that the first word of “Skip the front page of paper, heading for crossword instead?” might not be really doing double duty.
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.