Word.ws English Dictionary

what the what

what the what phrase: what the hell.

Phrase

what the what

  1. (euphemistic, informal, also African-American Vernacular) What the hell.
    • “Hey! What the what?!” yelled Horace. Oona looked over to see her cousin jumping around, yelping and clutching his shorts.2025, Kate Korsh, chapter 9, in When Fairies Go Too Far (Oona Bramblegoop’s Sideways Magic; 4), New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, →ISBN, page 85

Questions about what the what

What does what the what mean?
What the what means what the hell.
What part of speech is what the what?
What the what is a phrase.

Words near what the what in the dictionary

  1. what the hell
  2. what the helly
  3. what the hey
  4. what the scallop
  5. what the shit
  6. what the what
  7. what though
  8. what time
  9. what time do you make it
  10. what time have you got
  11. what time is it

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: what the what (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 what.wav.

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