In this article, size reduction and harmonic suppression in coupled-lines microstrip directional couplers is attained using dumbbell, and reshaped dumbbell slots, as defected patterns, specifically placed under the metering position in the ground plane. Quantitative investigation of the performance of the directional coupler as controlled by the variations of the DGS rectangular slots height, DGS gap length, and the DGS reshaped rectangular slot height is presented. This concept is further illustrated experimentally for a 12 dB coupler realized on RT/ Duroid 5880 substrate. The proposed DGS design confers size reduction because of the shift of the operating frequency to lower values. The measurements are in a good agreement with the simulated results and emphasize the size reduction and the harmonics suppression of the DGS coupled-lines microstrip directional coupler.