Word.ws English Dictionary

whydunit

whydunit noun: a type of detective story in which the focus is not on the person who committed the crime, but on the motives for committing it.

Noun

whydunit (plural whydunits)

  1. A type of detective story in which the focus is not on the person who committed the crime, but on the motives for committing it.
    • Connery takes over the interrogation and in the process beats the man to death. This much we know almost from the beginning, so the film is less of a whodunit than a whydunit.1985, Laurence Urdang, Walter W. Hunsinger, Nancy LaRoche, Picturesque expressions: a thematic dictionary, page 420

Forms of whydunit

pluralwhydunits
alternative formwhydunnit

Questions about whydunit

What does whydunit mean?
Whydunit means a type of detective story in which the focus is not on the person who committed the crime, but on the motives for committing it.
What part of speech is whydunit?
Whydunit is a noun.
What is the plural of whydunit?
The plural of whydunit is whydunits.

Words near whydunit in the dictionary

  1. whyda
  2. whydah
  3. whydahs
  4. whydas
  5. whydja
  6. whydunit
  7. whydunits
  8. whydunnit
  9. whydunnits
  10. whyed
  11. whyever

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whydunit (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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