Word.ws English Dictionary

what-iffery

what-iffery noun: speculation as to what might have happened if things had happened differently.

Noun

what-iffery (uncountable)

  1. (informal) Speculation as to what might have happened if things had happened differently.
    • […] what if Jonah is a piece of what-iffery, a story, an experiment with words, rather than a carefully honed piece of polemic […]2000, Yvonne Sherwood, A biblical text and its afterlives, page 209
    • The film's what-iffery becomes even more compelling when Blair, played, as in A Very Social Secretary, by a twitchingly reptilian Robert Lindsay, decides to stand down shortly before the 2010 general election.2007 January 9, Stuart Jeffries, “A prime minister in the dock”, in The Guardian

Origin of what-iffery

From what-if + -ery.

Questions about what-iffery

What does what-iffery mean?
What-iffery means speculation as to what might have happened if things had happened differently.
What part of speech is what-iffery?
What-iffery is a noun.

Words near what-iffery in the dictionary

  1. what-do-you-call-it
  2. what-do-you-call-its
  3. what-have-you
  4. what-if
  5. what-iffed
  6. what-iffery
  7. what-iffing
  8. what-ifs
  9. what-it's-like-ness
  10. what-it's-likeness
  11. what-like

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: what-iffery (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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