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''whit'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260708144405-00-⌔

whit - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

whit (plural whits)

  • (dated, chiefly in the negative) The smallest part or particle imaginable; an iota.
    • ✤ Synonyms: bit, iota, jot, scrap; see also Thesaurus: modicum
    • ✤ Star. I beleeue we muſt leaue the killing out, when all is done.
      Bot. Not a whit: I haue a deuice to make all well.      1
    • ✤ Sadly behind the great age of rowdy self-advertisement in which their lot has fallen, they seem not to have advanced one whit beyond John the Baptist and the Apostles, 1800 years ago, in their notions of the way in which the metanoia, the change of mind of the ill-doer, is to be brought about.2
    • ✤ But now another idea had obtruded itself, and was rapidly crowding his original intentions into the background. That American fortune was not to be sneezed at, nor was its possessor a whit less attractive.3
    • ✤ Now I was eight and very small,/And he was no whit bigger/And so I smiled, but he poked out/His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’4
    • ✤ In conclusion, I would remark that the great railway stations of London deserve to be visited every whit as much as St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Abbey, or the Tower, and they are as worthy a memento of this century as those buildings are of the days that are gone.5

Preposition

whit

  • Pronunciation spelling of with.

Etymology 1

From Middle English wiȝt, wight, from Old English wiht (“wight, person, creature, being, whit, thing, something, anything”), from Proto-Germanic ﹡wihtą (“thing, creature”) or ﹡wihtiz (“essence, object”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡wekti- (“cause, sake, thing”), from ﹡wekʷ- (“to say, tell”). Cognate with Old High German wiht (“creature, thing”), Dutch wicht, German Wicht. Doublet of wight.

Pronunciation

  • enPR: wĭt, hwĭt, IPA: /wɪt/, /ʍɪt/
  • Rhymes: -ɪt
  • Homophone: wit (wine–whine merger)

Etymology 2

Printed 2026-07-08.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iii], page 151: ↩

  2. 1890 December 9, Thomas H. Huxley, “Letter to the “Times” on the “Darkest England Scheme””, in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays ‎: ↩

  3. 1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 109: ↩

  4. 1917, Countee Cullen, Incident: ↩

  5. 1944 July and August, “London Railway Stations in 1893”, in Railway Magazine, page 201, taken from The English Illustrated Magazine of June 1893: ↩

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