Word.ws English Dictionary

what the

what the interjection: used to express astonishment or incredulity, as a question or questioning of the situation at hand, without requiring any specific vulgarity as intensifier.

Interjection

  1. (by ellipsis) Used to express astonishment or incredulity, as a question or questioning of the situation at hand, without requiring any specific vulgarity as intensifier.
    • Hee haw! Did that come out of me? Oh! Huh? What the …? What's going on? Ahhh!1940, as realization dawns that he is turning into a donkey, in Pinocchio (motion-picture), spoken by Lampwick (Frankie Darrow), Burbank: Disney; distributed by RKO Radio Pictures

Origin of what the

From various expressions such as what the Sam Hill, what the hey, what the heck, what the hell and what the fuck by aposiopesis.

Questions about what the

What does what the mean?
What the means used to express astonishment or incredulity, as a question or questioning of the situation at hand, without requiring any specific vulgarity as intensifier.
What part of speech is what the?
What the is an interjection.

Words near what the in the dictionary

  1. what someone is made of
  2. what someone said
  3. what someone says goes
  4. what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive
  5. what that mouth do
  6. what the
  7. what the actual fuck
  8. what the butler saw
  9. what the crap
  10. what the cuss
  11. what the deuce

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: what the (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-what the.wav.

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