whites
/(h)waɪts/
whites is the plural of white.
whites is the third-person singular simple present indicative of white.
Noun (1)
whites pl (plural only)
Meaning of white
Noun
white (countable and uncountable, plural whites)
- The color of snow or milk; the color of light containing equal amounts of all visible wavelengths.
- Not only were the platforms tiled in white, the tunnels were painted white too - to prettify them, and make them less claustrophobic - and the Central proudly issued a postcard of its tunnel-whitening machine.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 117
- A person of European descent with light-colored skin.
- The Indians carried first our canoes and then our stores through the brushwood, which is very thick at this point, while we four whites, our rifles on our shoulders, walked between them and any danger coming from the woods.1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC
- Any butterfly of the subfamily Pierinae in the family Pieridae.
- Several other beautiful butterflies rewarded my search in this place [...] The most abundant butterflies were the whites and yellows (Pieridae), several of which I had already found at Lombock and at Coupang, while others were new to me.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 297
- White wine.
- A bottle of red, a bottle of white / It all depends upon your appetite / I'll meet you any time you want / In our Italian Restaurant.1977, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, in Billy Joel (music), The Stranger
- White coffee
- The albumen of bird eggs (egg white).
Noun (2) capitalized: Whites
Whites
- plural of White
Proper noun capitalized: Whites
Whites
- plural of White
- The chariot-racing faction of the Roman circus and Constantinopolitan hippodrome that wore white.
- Directly opposite the imperial box in the Hippodrome were the seats assigned to the Blues, the Reds, the Whites, and the Greens. These were the colours of the chariot-racing factions, the professional organizations initially responsible for fielding the teams, though at some point in the fifth...2002, James Allan Stewart Evans, The Age of Justinian..., p. 36
- The away team during international matches.
- 1996, S. Greenfield, "When the Whites Go Marching In? Racism and Resistances in English Football", Marquette Sports Law Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Art. 7, p. 315: #*: "When the Whites go Marching In" is a version of the hymn "When the Saints Go Marching In" and has been sung by football fans whilst...
- When the Whites go marching in, oh, when the Whites go marching in, oh, I wanna be in that number when the Whites go marching in!
- Juventus.
Origin of whites
In reference to the ancient Roman and medieval Byzantine racing faction, a calque of albī (“Whites”), albātī (“White-Clads”), factio alba (“the white faction”), or factio albata (“the white-clad faction”) and Λευκοὶ (Leukoì, “Whites”).
Words formed from whites
Phrases with whites
Words that rhyme with whites
Questions about whites
- What does whites mean?
- Whites means a set of white clothes, especially as a uniform.
- What is whites the plural of?
- Whites is the plural of white.
- What part of speech is whites?
- Whites can be a noun or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce whites?
- Whites is pronounced /(h)waɪts/.
Words near whites in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whites (page history and authors); Whites (page history and authors); white (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: en-au-whites.ogg.
Cite this entry: “whites.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whites. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.