Policespeak

name, noun

name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The jargon or formal language used by the police. uncountable

    "In the passage above, two of the terms used by the interviewing officer are typical of legalistic/pseudo-legalistic policespeak. The officer uses the term "vehicle" even after the details of the vehicle type have been established, […]"

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A constructed language for police and emergency service cooperation at the Channel Tunnel, using a limited vocabulary drawn from French and English.

Example

More examples

"In the passage above, two of the terms used by the interviewing officer are typical of legalistic/pseudo-legalistic policespeak. The officer uses the term "vehicle" even after the details of the vehicle type have been established, […]"

Etymology

From police + -speak.

Related phrases

channel tunnelconstructed languageemergency service

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.