whit
Americannoun
noun
adjective
noun
Etymology
Origin of whit
1470–80; perhaps alteration of Middle English wiht wight 1
Explanation
Whit means a small tiny part of something. If you don't even have a whit of courage, you are most likely a chicken. Whit indicates a bit of something, and usually something abstract like a feeling or emotion. You might feel the last whit of your confidence depart when your teacher hands out the 32-page final exam. Don't confuse whit with wit, meaning mental sharpness or keen sense of humor. Let's hope you have more than a whit of wit in your personality!
Vocabulary lists containing whit
Julius Caesar
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Tuck Everlasting
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100 SAT words Beginning with W,X,Y, and Z
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Speculators, in contrast, care not a whit for cash flow; they are focused instead on future stock prices.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 24, 2025
“It changes not a whit about our policy.”
From Seattle Times ● May 21, 2024
As I argue in my new book, at the time of the stand of the 300 at Thermopylae, the Spartans cared not a whit for freedom or liberating others.
From Slate ● Jan. 16, 2024
But equivocation in a country that doesn’t care a whit if Shakespeare is still on the syllabus can easily pass unnoticed.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 24, 2023
But honestly, Hanako didn’t care a whit what he cared a whit about—after all, this was not the time to be sensitive.
From "A Place to Belong" by Cynthia Kadohata
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“In our view, there’s still a lot of embedded and unrealized earnings within this business, driving a multiyear margin story,” Leerink analyst Whit Mayo wrote in a client note.
From Barron's ● Jun. 17, 2026
“The most important reasons he won in 2024 were his promises to bring inflation down and juice the economy,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 19, 2025
Long before he found himself in the middle of a multibillion-dollar takeover battle for a coveted new weight-loss drug, Whit Bernard was a music nerd.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 7, 2025
The one who has truly lost his patience with it is her son, Whit, a seventh-grader at Austin’s General Marshall Middle School who says the phrase interrupts all his classes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 14, 2025
Coach Whit slid between us, but that wasn't enough to stop what was coming.
From "Patina" by Jason Reynolds
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.