Word.ws English Dictionary

wee

/wiː/

wee adjective: small, little. Also the obsolete emphatic of we.

Adjective

wee (comparative weer, superlative weest)

  1. (Ireland, New Zealand, Northern England, Scotland, Ottawa Valley) Small, little.
    • You looked a little cold, so I lit a wee fire.
    • The beat of its wee heart held against her own, sent her intense maternity surging like the spring sap in a young tree.1907, Barbara Baynton, edited by Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson, Human Toll (Portable Australian Authors: Barbara Baynton), St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, published 1980, page 275

Noun (1)

wee

  1. A short time or short distance.

Noun (2)

wee (countable and uncountable, plural wees)

  1. (colloquial, uncountable) Urine.
    Synonyms:
    wee-wee, urine
  2. (colloquial, countable) An act of urination.
    • I need to have a wee.
    • Um, by the way, make sure everyone knows if the papal envoy says "We desire to wash our hands", that means he wants to go and have a pee (laugh track)... Yes, a Royal wee (laugh track) — followed by a Royal flush (laugh track).1987 December 17, Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn, “A Diplomatic Incident”, in Yes, Prime Minister, season 2, episode 3, spoken by Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds)

Verb

wee (third-person singular simple present wees, present participle weeing, simple past and past participle weed)

  1. (UK, colloquial) To urinate.
    • I need to wee! I can't hold it any longer!
    • When I was young, I was up every night until the wee hours. Now I'm up every hour at night to wee.2011 March 15, Tom Armstrong, Marvin (comic)
    Synonyms:
    wee-wee

Interjection

  1. The squeal of a pig.
    • Pigling Bland became frightened and cried "Wee, wee, wee! I can't find my way home!"1913, Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Pigling Bland

Noun (3) capitalized: WEE

WEE (uncountable)

  1. (abbreviation) Abbreviation of Western equine encephalomyelitis.

Proper noun capitalized: Wee

Wee (countable and uncountable, plural Wees)

  1. A surname.

Also used as

wee is also the obsolete emphatic of we.

wee is also the alternative form of whee.

wee meaning in Urdu, Malayalam, Kannada and Persian

wee in Urdu

small, little
چھوٹی čhōṭī

wee in Persian

small, little
کوچولو kučulu

Examples of wee in a sentence

  • There's Jimmy Hanlon was never his own man since, and I had me nose broke on me—I find it yet—and some says there was a wee girl from Tanderagee got herself killed.1915, Charles L Graves, Humours of Irish life, pages 241-242:
  • I had not seen a wee boy do it like that before.2008, James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy, Penguin, published 2009, page 73:

All 40 example sentences with wee

Synonyms of wee

Forms of wee

Adjective
comparativeweer
superlativeweest
Noun
pluralwees
Verb
third-person singular presentwees
present participleweeing
past participleweed
pastweed
Proper noun
pluralWees

Origin of wee

From Middle English wey, weygh, wegh, weȝe, wæȝe (“little bit”), from Old English wǣġ, wǣġe (“weight”), from Proto-West Germanic *wāgu, from Proto-Germanic *wēgō (“scales, weight”) and *wēgǭ (“weight”), related to Middle English weġan (“to move, weigh”) (15c).

Onomatopoeic for the sound of urination. The noun derives from the verb.

See we.

Words formed from wee

Phrases with wee

Words that rhyme with wee

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wee

What does wee mean?
Wee means small, little.
What is wee in Urdu?
Wee in Urdu is چھوٹی (čhōṭī). See Wee meaning in Urdu.
How do you use wee in a sentence?
There's Jimmy Hanlon was never his own man since, and I had me nose broke on me—I find it yet—and some says there was a wee girl from Tanderagee got herself killed.
What part of speech is wee?
Wee can be an adjective, a noun, a verb or an interjection.
How do you pronounce wee?
Wee is pronounced /wiː/.

Words near wee in the dictionary

  1. wedsetting
  2. wedsite
  3. wedsites
  4. wedtro
  5. wedtros
  6. wee
  7. wee folk
  8. wee folks
  9. Wee Free
  10. Wee Frees
  11. wee heavies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wee (page history and authors); WEE (page history and authors); Wee (page history and authors); wee (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); wee (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-wee.ogg.

Cite this entry: “wee.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wee. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.