whisht
whisht interjection: shush, silence, be quiet!
Interjection
- Shush, silence, be quiet!
- [O]h! how he did bellow, an' how he did squeal. "Whisht, alanna," sed Judy, "there's no fear o' yer; shure it's only ovir the stone bridge we're goin'."1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 526
- “You must have loved him very much,” she said.
“Whisht,” said the old woman, “there’s a word that you must never use until there's marrying between you […]”1952, Neville Shute, chapter 9, in The Far Country, London: Heinemann
- A sound often used to calm livestock, cattle, sheep etc.
Forms of whisht
| alternative form | wheesht |
|---|---|
| alternative form | weesht |
| alternative form | whish |
| alternative form | whist |
Origin of whisht
From Middle English qwyst, whisht, whist, imitative, though perhaps influenced by other verbs in wh- used in the imperative or by hust (adjective).
Words formed from whisht
Questions about whisht
- What does whisht mean?
- Whisht means shush, silence, be quiet!
- What part of speech is whisht?
- Whisht is an interjection.
Words near whisht in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whisht (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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Cite this entry: “whisht.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whisht. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.