Word.ws English Dictionary

what gives

what gives phrase: what is wrong? Why is this happening?

Phrase

what gives?

  1. (colloquial) What is wrong? Why is this happening?
    • Not even thirty minutes after leaving the shower, my head starts itching. What gives?
  2. (colloquial) What is happening? What is going on?
    • What gives with you and Martha?
  3. (colloquial) How are you?

Origin of what gives

First attested in 1940, in John O'Hara's novel Pal Joey. The term is considered by the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, Second Edition (2013) and several other references to be a calque of German “was gibt's?” and/or a Yiddish equivalent. Brian Joseph disputes this, and speculates that despite extremely late attestation, it and the German was gibt's may "allow[] for a reconstruction of a Proto-West-Germanic existential use of 'give', which survives marginally into present usage."

Questions about what gives

What does what gives mean?
What gives means what is wrong? Why is this happening?
What part of speech is what gives?
What gives is a phrase.

Words near what gives in the dictionary

  1. what doesn't kill you makes you stronger
  2. what else is new
  3. what foot the shoe is on
  4. what for
  5. what fors
  6. what gives
  7. what go round come round
  8. what goes
  9. what goes around comes around
  10. what goes on
  11. what goes round comes round

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: what gives (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Sapaa-what gives.wav.

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