Word.ws English Dictionary

whats

whats is the plural of what.

Meaning of what

Noun

what (countable and uncountable, plural whats)

  1. (obsolete, uncountable) Something; thing; stuff.
    • They prayd him sit, and gave him for to feed / Such homely what as serves the simple clowne, / That doth despise the dainties of the towne[…]1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 7
  2. (countable) The identity of a thing, as an answer to a question of what.
    • The emphasis on the interplay between the hows and whats of interpretive practice is paramount.2005, Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, page 493
  3. (countable) Something that is addressed by what, as opposed to a person, addressed by who.
    • Regina: What are you?
    • Rumplestiltskin: What? What? What? My, my, what a rude question! I am not a what.2012, "We Are Both", season 2, episode 2 of Once Upon a Time

See all 21 meanings of what

Questions about whats

What is whats the plural of?
Whats is the plural of what.

Words near whats in the dictionary

  1. whatness
  2. whatnesses
  3. whatnot
  4. whatnots
  5. whatnottery
  6. whats
  7. whats'erface
  8. whats'ername
  9. whats'ernames
  10. whats'isface
  11. whats'isname

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whats (page history and authors); 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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