Word.ws English Dictionary

howdunit

howdunit noun: a type of detective story in which the focus is not on the person who committed the crime, but on the manner in which it was committed.

Noun

howdunit (plural howdunits)

  1. A type of detective story in which the focus is not on the person who committed the crime, but on the manner in which it was committed.
    • After half a century, the whodunit was joined by the howdunit, in which the emphasis swung from the identity of the murderer to the method by which the murder was committed.1969, Ellery Queen, In the Queens' Parlor, and Other Leaves from the Editors' Notebook, page 72

Forms of howdunit

pluralhowdunits
alternative formhowdunnit

Questions about howdunit

What does howdunit mean?
Howdunit means a type of detective story in which the focus is not on the person who committed the crime, but on the manner in which it was committed.
What part of speech is howdunit?
Howdunit is a noun.
What is the plural of howdunit?
The plural of howdunit is howdunits.

Words near howdunit in the dictionary

  1. howdie
  2. howdied
  3. howdies
  4. howdja
  5. Howdon
  6. howdunit
  7. howdunits
  8. howdunnit
  9. howdunnits
  10. howdy
  11. howdy doody

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: howdunit (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.

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