Word.ws English Dictionary

whydunnit

whydunnit is the alternative spelling of whydunit.

Meaning of whydunit

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 whydunnit

pluralwhydunnits

Questions about whydunnit

What is whydunnit the alternative spelling of?
Whydunnit is the alternative spelling of whydunit.

Words near whydunnit in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whydunnit (page history and authors); 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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Cite this entry: “whydunnit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whydunnit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.