Word.ws English Dictionary

who's on first

who's on first noun: a situation in which confusion arises due to homophones and similar misunderstandings.

Noun

who's on first (plural who's on firsts)

  1. A situation in which confusion arises due to homophones and similar misunderstandings.
    • This pride of sponsorship, rather than pride of rating, seems to have been lost in the welter of decimal points and who's-on-firsts.1965, Saturday Review
    • With that, you'll know she knows how you feel — which relieves you of the supposed-tos, the what-ifs, the what's-my-moves and the who's-on-firsts, and frees you just to see how it all turns out.2009 October 11, Caroline Hax, “Dad's views threaten family peace”, in Times Union

Examples of who's on first in a sentence

  • But Rose interprets the remark as a statement that the girl is having a party herself, which leads to a “Who's on first?” comedy of errors.2013, Martha P. Nochimson, David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire, University of Texas Press, →ISBN:
  • This 'who's on first' conversation continued, both of us getting more and more frustrated than the other, until it hit me.2013, Simon Pont, Digital State: How the Internet is Changing Everything, Kogan Page Publishers, →ISBN, page 64:
  • (The Japanese car model is a Sosumi, as we learn in a Who's on First? comic exchange; Gribble recently dealt with a case involving an Isuyu.)2015, Steven Moore, William Gaddis: Expanded Edition, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, →ISBN, page 150:

Forms of who's on first

pluralwho's on firsts
alternative formWho's on First
alternative formwho's-on-first

Origin of who's on first

From "Who's on First?", a comic routine from 1930s vaudeville made famous by Abbott and Costello, in which two people discussing a baseball team become confused by names such as "Who" and "What".

Questions about who's on first

What does who's on first mean?
Who's on first means a situation in which confusion arises due to homophones and similar misunderstandings.
How do you use who's on first in a sentence?
But Rose interprets the remark as a statement that the girl is having a party herself, which leads to a “Who's on first?” comedy of errors.
What part of speech is who's on first?
Who's on first is a noun.
What is the plural of who's on first?
The plural of who's on first is who's on firsts.

Words near who's on first in the dictionary

  1. who's a good boy
  2. who's a good girl
  3. who's a pretty boy then
  4. who's asking
  5. who's calling
  6. who's on first
  7. who's on firsts
  8. who's robbing this coach
  9. who's to say?
  10. who's who
  11. who's who in the zoo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: who's on first (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:

Cite this entry: “who's on first.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/who%27s_on_first. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.