Word.ws English Dictionary

^W

^W interjection: delete that last word.

Interjection

  1. (Internet, humorous, usually) Delete that last word.
    • Yeah, he's a real jerk^W civility-challenged fellow.
    • Well, Mimi, you’re old enough that you should go to parties now, so this should be your last year to tickle feet^W^W trick-or-treat.

Origin of ^W

From the visual representation of the terminal encoding of the keypress Ctrl-W, the "delete back to whitespace" command in GNU readline, which is commonly available in GNU shells and other command-line utilities.

Questions about ^W

What does ^W mean?
^W means delete that last word.
What part of speech is ^W?
^W is an interjection.

Words near ^W in the dictionary

  1. @ed
  2. @ing
  3. @s
  4. ^
  5. ^H
  6. ^W
  7. `gt`
  8. `lsqb`citation needed`rsqb`
  9. `lt`/s`gt`
  10. `lt`3
  11. `lt`g`gt`

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ^W (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “^W.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/%5Ew. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.