What's a Double Negative? 5 Ways to Use Them Correctly

I made an embarrassing mistake the other day. I wrote "I can't hardly believe..." when I should have written "I can hardly believe..."

"Can't hardly" is an example of a double negative—something many writing experts say you should avoid—and it also doesn't make much sense if you look at it logically. Often double negatives mean the opposite of what you are trying to say. (But you may have heard me say before that English isn’t always a logical language, and you’ll see that’s the case here too.)

Double Negatives in Chaucer and Shakespeare

Double negatives used to be much more common in English than they are today, and Chaucer seemed to like them. For example, he describes the Knight in “The Canterbury Tales" by saying, “He never yet no vileness didn’t say.” That’s more than a double  negative! That’s a multiple negative.

Shakespeare also used double negatives. For example, in “As You Like It,” Celia says, “I cannot go no further.” If “you can go no further” was negative, then “you can’t go no further” was even more negative or emphatic.

In Shakespeare’s and Chaucer’s time, it was normal to use double and triple negatives to add emphasis, and even today, other languages, such as Spanish and French, also use double negatives to add emphasis to the negativity. 

In some dialects today, people still use double negatives for emphasis. For example, “I’m not doing nothing” can seem stronger than “I’m not doing anything.” But double negatives like that aren’t considered Standard English anymore. In other words, some people will look down on you if you use them.

The Original Rules Against Double Negatives

It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that prescriptivist grammarians started saying we shouldn’t use double negatives in English because they aren’t logical. Robert Lowth, a bishop and toweringly influential grammarian of his time, and who is also known for promoting the idea that we shouldn’t...

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