Chinese whispers is a story that has been passed along a chain of people and garbled on the way, so that the final version bears little resemblance to the first. The phrase is British and it comes from the children’s party game of that name. Nobody recorded why the name was chosen; the likeliest reason is that ‘Chinese’ had long been used in English compounds to mark something as irregular or hard to follow. The game is much older than the name, and the Victorians knew it as ‘Russian Scandal’.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Chinese whispers’?
The expression ‘Chinese whispers’ is commonly used in the UK and many other parts of the English-speaking world, although less so in the USA. It derives from the party game in which one person whispers a message to the person next to them and the story is then passed progressively to several others, with inaccuracies accumulating as the game goes on. The point of the game is the amusement obtained from the last player’s announcement of the story they heard, that typically being nothing like the original. The game is played in all parts of the world and each country has its own names for it, notably, in the USA it is usually called ‘Telephone’ or ‘Gossip’.
That British restriction is recorded in the dictionaries. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English marks ‘Chinese whispers’ as British English and defines it as ‘the passing of information from one person to another, and then to others, when the information gets slightly changed each time’. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives the same British English label and the same general sense, ‘the situation when information is passed from one person to another and gets slightly changed each time’, without mentioning the game at all.
The name ‘Chinese Whispers’ was adopted for the game in the UK in the mid 20th century, prior to that it was known as ‘Russian Scandal’ or ‘Russian Gossip’. The reason for the change isn’t clear. It is sometimes suggested that the phrase is a racial slur and is intended to convey the idea that the Chinese talk nonsense. I see no reason to assume that. The English aren’t especially badly disposed towards the Chinese - there are many other races on the UK hit list above the Chinese. I think the decision by whoever coined the phrase had more to do with the Chinese language being more incomprehensible to English ears than Russian. If there is any racial stereotyping inherent in the phrase it may be by an association with the idea that the Chinese are inscrutable.
Whichever it was, the naming follows a settled English habit. The Online Etymology Dictionary, in its entry for ‘Chinese’, records that as a modifier the adjective ‘may suggest complexity or irregularity’, and it dates ‘Chinese fire-drill’, for a chaotic scene of people rushing about to no purpose, to 1962 in American military slang. Green’s Dictionary of Slang is blunter about where that habit comes from. It heads its entry for ‘Chinese’ as one of the racial stereotypes used in English slang, and says the modifier ‘always has “Chinese” implying something slightly out of kilter, physically, ethically or otherwise’. ‘Chinese whispers’ belongs with that group of compounds however it was arrived at.
For that reason some British publications now avoid the name. The Guardian and Observer style guide lists it under C with the flat instruction ‘avoid except in direct quotes’. The dictionaries quoted above still carry the term as ordinary British English, so the objection is to the wording of the name rather than to the game or to the sense.
The ‘Russian Scandal’ stage is well documented. In 1890 the archaeologist General Pitt-Rivers used the game as an analogy in a talk at the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury, to explain how ornamental patterns drift out of shape as they are copied and re-copied. The extract published by the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford describes ‘a game called “Russian Scandal”, in which one person introduces a short story, consisting of a few sentences and repeats it in a whisper to his neighbour, who in his turn repeats it to a third person, and so on in succession, until the last person of the party is made to repeat the story, as he heard it from the one before him’. That is the game exactly as it is played now, under the older name, three quarters of a century before the newer one reached print.
The first citation of the name in print is found in the English newspaper The Guardian, March 1964:
The children’s game of ‘Chinese whispers’… in which whispered messages were passed around the room and the version which came back to the starting point bore no relation to the original message.
The use in a more general sense, to describe everyday mis-telling of stories, began as recently as the 1980s. It first started appearing in print and in online postings in Usenet newsgroups in 1989. This was probably a consequence of the use of ‘Chinese Whispers’ as the name of a track on the 1985 album Stereotomy by The English rock group The Alan Parsons Project.