Below are listed various examples of words and phrases that have been identified as shibboleths, a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style can be used to differentiate members of ingroups from those of outgroups.
Original shibboleth The term originates from the Hebrew word (), which means the part of a plant containing grain, such as the head of a stalk of wheat or rye;Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch, Sixth Edition and (this latter meaning is not in use in Modern Hebrew) or less commonly (but arguably more appropriately) "flood, torrent".
The modern use derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect used a differently sounding first consonant. The difference concerns the Hebrew letter shin, which is now pronounced as (as in shoe). In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead under the command of Jephthah inflicted a military defeat upon the invading tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BC), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the River Jordan back into their home territory, but the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word shibboleth. The Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like sibboleth. In Judges 12:5–6 in the King James Bible, the anecdote appears thus (with the word already in its current English spelling):
Shibboleths used in war and persecution
Dutch–French Schild en vriend: On 18 May 1302, the people of Bruges killed the French occupiers of the city during a nocturnal surprise attack. According to a famous legend, they stormed into the houses where they knew the tenants were forced to board and lodge French troops serving as city guards, roused every male person from his bed and forced him to repeat the challenge schild en vriend (shield and friend). The Flemings pronounced with a separate "s" and "ch" ". Flemings would pronounce with a voiced v whereas French would render those as a voiceless f.
Every Frenchman who failed the test was stabbed on the spot, still in his nightgown. Because the signal for the uprising was the matins bells of the city's churches and monasteries, this became known as the Bruges Matins or Brugse Metten. Like the name of the massacre, the story may have been influenced by the Sicilian uprising mentioned below.
The problem with this legend is that in Medieval manuscripts of that time, a shield is referred to as "skilde" as in Norse and Norse-influenced English words. Therefore, it is sometimes said that the words must have been "'s gilden vriend" meaning "friend of the guilds." The combination of the 's and the g in "'s gilden" would be pronounced .
Italian/Sicilian–French Ciciri (chickpeas): This was used by native Sicilians to ferret out Angevin French soldiers in the late 13th century during the Sicilian Vespers, the uprising which freed the island from Angevin rule. Both the Italian soft c , and the Italian r, were (and are still) difficult for the French to pronounce as that sequence of sounds seldom appears in French; also, in French and Angevin, words are primarily stressed on the final syllable.
Sardinian-Italian During Sardinian Vespers, on 28 April 1794, known as Sa dì de s´acciappa – Dramma storico in due tempi e sette quadri, Piero Marcialis, 1996, Condaghes ("the day of the pursuit and capture"), people in Cagliari started chasing any Piedmontese functionaries they could find; since many of them started to wear the local robes in order to blend into the crowd, any people suspected to be from the Italian mainland would be asked by the populace to "say chickpea" () in Sardinian: failure in pronouncing the word correctly would give their origin away.
Frisian–Dutch
Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries () (meaning "Butter, rye bread and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is not a genuine Frisian") was used by the Frisian Pier Gerlofs Donia during a Frisian rebellion (1515–1523). Ships whose crew could not pronounce this properly were usually plundered and soldiers who could not were beheaded by Donia himself.
Castilian Spanish–Latin-American Spanish During the Latin American wars of independence, the name was used by Colombian rebels to tell locals from Spaniards. Whoever pronounced it as (as in European Spanish) as opposed to would have been thrown into the Magdalena River.
English–Dutch In the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, many Flemings "loste hir heedes at that tyme and namely they that koude nat say Breede and Chese, but Case and Brode."Chronicles of London; Oxford University Press, 1905; ed. C. L. Kingsford; pp. XXXVI, 15
Finnish–Russian : Finnish for "one", used by the White Guard to separate Russians from Finns in the Finnish Civil War during the invasion of Tampere. Many of the Russians caught had changed to civilian clothing, so suspected people were rounded up, even from hospitals, and asked to say (or made to count to ten in Finnish). If the prisoner pronounced it , mistaking the front vowel 'y' for an iotated 'u' (ю), he was considered a Russian foreign fighter and was shot on the spot. Any Slav or Balt, Communist or not, was killed, including some members of the White Guard. : Finnish for "steamroller", used by the Finnish Army in the Second World War. This word is almost impossible to pronounce for anyone not skilled in Finnish, with the frontal 'ö' and 'y' and rolled 'r' . For Russian speakers, the leading 'h' is also difficult.
Spanish–French and Haitian Creole Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo conducted a massacre of undocumented Haitian settlers along the Dominican–Haitian border. The action is known as the Parsley Massacre. Suspects not fluent in Spanish either did not know or could not properly pronounce the Spanish word perejil ("parsley"). The pronunciation of the word by Haitian citizens tended to be with a trilled r, unlike the native Spanish tapped r, and without the 'l' at the end of the word.
Azeri–Armenian During the Sumgait Pogrom, Azerbaijani rioters targeted ethnic Armenians pulled from their homes and vehicles by asking them the Azerbaijani word for hazelnut, fundukh (), which Armenians typically pronounce with a instead of an .Shahmuratian. Sumgait Tragedy, Interview with Vanya Bazyan, p. 159; also: Vahagn Martirosyan, interview (Alexandre Billette, Hervé Dez (2014) - Transkraïna, online, retrieved 2014.02.13
Polish–German Soczewica, koło, miele, młyn (Old Polish pronunciation: ), meaning "lentil, wheel, grinds [verb], mill": In 1312, the Polish Prince Ladislaus the Elbow-high quelled the Rebellion of wójt Albert in Kraków, populated mostly by Silesian, German and Czech citizens. Anyone over the age of 7 who could not pronounce these Polish words was put to death, ejected from the city or had their property confiscated. 'Ł' (then pronounced as a velarized alveolar lateral approximant, aka dark l) and dental [s̪] are both unlikely to be pronounced properly by Germans since they cannot make out the difference from their own sounds [l] and [s]. (The former was approximated by Germans as l, and has evolved now into a sound similar to English w).
Japanese–Korean Following the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which occurred in an area with a high Korean population, there were rumors that the local Korean population poisoned the wells. The locals accosted random people with Japanese phrases that were difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers, resulting in the killings of ethnic Koreans. Many ethnic Chinese were also killed as they were also unable to correctly pronounce the shibboleths. An unforeseen consequence of the hysteria-induced killings was that some ethnic Japanese from outlying regions, such as Okinawa, were also killed as they had accents that sounded strange to the paranoid locals.Modern values, not tradition, kept Japanese public calm. China.org.cn. Retrieved 30 May 2023 The phrase was one of the shibboleths used to Koreans, as pronouncing voiced consonants were difficult for them.
Ukrainian–Russian Palianytsia: a type of Ukrainian bread. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the word palianytsia (, ) became one of those proposed to use to identify Russian subversive reconnaissance groups, as it is unlikely to be pronounced properly by Russians due to different phonetics of the Russian language, according to apostrophe.ua. On Russian state television, Russia-1 television host Olga Skabeyeva pronounced this word as "polyanitsa" and said that it means strawberry, confusing it with another Ukrainian word, polunytsia (, ).
Culture, religion and language-specific shibboleths English-speaking Allied personnel in Europe, during the Second World War, frequently made use of passwords in which labio-velar approximants (w-sounds) or voiceless dental fricatives (th-sounds) were prominent, as these are unusual in spoken German, and the letter w is normally pronounced "v" by native speakers of German. For instance, following D-Day (1944) US forces used the challenge-response "Flash" – "Thunder" – "Welcome". American soldiers could ferret out German infiltrators during their time in the Western Front. German spies were taught British English, which was different from American English. For example, Britons used the word lorry rather than the American term truck. American soldiers used such words as a shibboleth to distinguish Nazi spies. Israeli forces during the 1948 Palestine war used passwords chosen to contain voiceless bilabial stops (p-sounds), which are not found in Arabic, and which native speakers of Arabic often replace with a voiced bilabial stop (b-sounds). In the Lebanese Civil War of 1975, Christian Lebanese soldiers targeted suspected Palestinians at checkpoints by asking how they pronounced the Arabic word for "tomato", which is pronounced "banadoura" in Lebanese Arabic and "bandoura" in Palestinian Arabic. If they said the former, they were let through; if they said the latter, they were shot on the spot. At the Battle of Mount Tumbledown in the 1982 Falklands War, the Scots Guards replaced the established passwords for their night attack with the phrase "Hey Jimmie", because the Spanish-speaking Argentinians would have difficulty pronouncing the English consonant "J". During the Somali Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab's 2013 shooting and hostage siege attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, the attackers asked for Islamic prophet Muhammad's mother Aminah bint Wahb's name and the shahada as religious shibboleths to determine Muslims and non-Muslims. Muslims were freed, while non-Muslims were targeted. An Indian man who could not name Aminah was shot dead. The mostly Christian Filipino ground troops fighting in the 2013 Zamboanga City crisis used the Lord's Prayer as a way to identify Moro insurgents. Those who could not recite the Lord's Prayer in any Philippine language, including English, were immediately suspected of being part of the armed Moro National Liberation Front and detained. All non-Christians, including non-combatant Muslims, would also fail the test. During the 2025 Pahalgam attack carried out by the Islamist terrorist group The Resistance Front (a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba) in the Baisaran Valley of the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, the attackers used religious shibboleths to identify victims. The militants asked tourists to recite the Islamic Kalima (the Muslim declaration of faith) and checked for circumcision. to distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. While a local Muslim pony ride operator was killed while attempting to disarm an attacker, the primary targets were Hindu and Christian tourists, 25 of whom were shot at point-blank range. The incident led to a significant diplomatic crisis and the subsequent military conflict between India and Pakistan.
Other non-English shibboleths