wit
/wɪt/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
Southern US/wɪt/
wit noun: sanity. Also the pronunciation spelling of with.
Noun (1)
wit (countable and uncountable, plural wits)
- Sanity.
- He's gone completely out of his wits.
- The senses.
- Keep your wits about you.
- Intellectual ability; faculty of thinking, reasoning.
- Where she has gone to is beyond the wit of man to say.
- The ability to think quickly; mental cleverness, especially under short time constraints.
- My father had a quick wit and a steady hand.
- Intelligence; common sense.
- The opportunity was right in front of you, and you didn't even have the wit to take it!
- I gif the witt, I gif the strenght, / of all thou sees, of brede & lengthe; / thou shall be wonder wise. / Myrth and Ioy to haue at will, / All thi likyng to fulfill, / and dwell in paradise.15th c., “[The Creation]”, in Wakefield Mystery Plays; Re-edited in George England, Alfred W. Pollard, editors, The Towneley Plays (Early English Text Society Extra Series; LXXI), London: […] Oxford...
- Humour, especially when clever or quick.
- The best man's speech was hilarious, full of wit and charm.
- Wit is just as much put upon—blamed for a thousand impertinences over which it would not have held for a moment its glittering shield; it is like the radiant fairy doomed to wander over earth, concealed and transformed, and only allowed on rare occasions to shine forth in its true and sparkling...1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XVIII, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 152
- A person who tells funny anecdotes or jokes; someone witty.
- Your friend is quite a wit, isn't he?
- Tuc[ca]. […] Can thy Author doe it impudently enough? / Hiſt[rio]. O, I warrant you, Captaine: and ſpitefully inough too; he ha's one of the moſt ouerflowing villanous wits, in Rome. He will ſlander any man that breathes; If he diſguſt him. / Tucca. I'le know the poor, egregious, nitty Raſcall; and...1601, Ben Jonson, Poetaster or The Arraignment: […], London: […] [R. Bradock] for M[atthew] L[ownes] […], published 1602, →OCLC, Act III
Verb
wit
Noun (2) capitalized: WIT
WIT (plural WITs)
- Initialism of waterfowl identification test.
Also used as
wit is also the pronunciation spelling of with.
wit meaning in Arabic
wit in Arabic
- intellectual ability
- وعي, إدراك
Examples of wit in a sentence
- It is well that wit is an impalpable and ethereal substance, or it must long since have evaporated in indignation at that peculiarly wretched and mistaken race, its imitators.1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XVIII, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to...
- Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing".1996 February 4, Jennifer Crittenden, “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield”, in The Simpsons, season 7, episode 14, production...
- […] the cemetery – which people of shattering wit like Sampson never tired of calling ‘the dead centre of town’ […]1991 September, Stephen Fry, chapter 1, in The Liar, London: Heinemann, →ISBN, section III, page 26:
- O, I warrant you, Captaine: and ſpitefully inough too; he ha's one of the moſt ouerflowing villanous wits, in Rome.1601, Ben Jonson, Poetaster or The Arraignment: […], London: […] [R. Bradock] for M[atthew] L[ownes] […], published 1602, →OCLC, Act III:
Synonyms of wit
Forms of wit
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | wits |
| plural | WITs |
| Verb | |
| first-person singular present | wot |
| first-person singular past | wist |
| second-person singular present | wost |
| second-person singular present | wottest |
| second-person singular past | wistest |
| third-person singular present | wot |
| third-person singular past | wist |
| plural past | wist |
| present participle | witting |
| past participle | wist |
Origin of wit
From Middle English wit, witt, wyt, from Old English witt (“mind, sanity, sense, understanding”), from Proto-West Germanic *witi, from Proto-Germanic *witją (“knowledge; reason; wit”), from Proto-Germanic *witaną (“to know”), from Proto-Indo-European *wóyde (“to know”), from *weyd- (“to see”). Cognates Cognate with Dutch wit (“knowledge”), German and Luxembourgish Witz (“joke; humour, wit”), Low German Weet (“knowledge; idea; inkling”), Yiddish וויץ (vits, “joke”), Danish vid (“wit”), Faroese and Icelandic vit (“intelligence, wits; reason, sense; knowledge; awareness, sentience”), Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish vett (“intelligence, sense, wit”), Norwegian Nynorsk vett, vit (“sense, wits”), Gothic 𐌿𐌽𐍅𐌹𐍄𐌹 (unwiti, “folly, ignorance”); also Breton gouzout (“to know”), Cornish godhvos, goffos (“to know”), Irish feadair (“to know”), Welsh gwybod (“to know”), Latin videō (“to see”), Ancient Greek οἶδ’ (oîd’), οἶδα (oîda, “to know”), Albanian vizë (“line, stripe, track; dash”), Latvian veids (“form, kind, mode, type”), Lithuanian veidas (“face; front; appearance, aspect, look”), Belarusian ве́даць (vjédacʹ, “to know”), Bulgarian вям (vjam, “to know”), Czech vědět (“to know”), Polish...
From Middle English witen, woten, from Old English weotan, witan, from Proto-West Germanic *witan, from Proto-Germanic *witaną (“to know”), from Proto-Indo-European *wóyde (“to know”), from *weyd- (“to see”). Cognates Cognate with North Frisian waase, wed, weet (“to know”), Saterland Frisian wíete (“to know”), West Frisian wite, witte (“to know”), Alemannic German wüsse (“to know”), Cimbrian bizzan (“to know”), Dutch and Low German weten (“to know”), German wissen (“to know”), Limburgish wéïte (“to know; to remember”), Luxembourgish wëssen (“to know”), Vilamovian wysa, wyssa (“to know”), Yiddish וויסן (visn, “to know”), Danish vide (“to know”), Elfdalian witå (“to know”), Faroese and Icelandic vita (“to know”), Jutish veer (“to know”), Norwegian Bokmål vide, vite (“to know”), Norwegian Nynorsk veta, vita, våtå (“to know”), Scanian veda (“to know”), Swedish veta (“to know”), Gothic 𐍅𐌹𐍄𐌰𐌽 (witan, “to know”); also Breton gouzout (“to know”), Cornish godhvos, goffos (“to know”), Irish feadair (“to know”), Welsh gwybod (“to know”), Latin videō (“to see”), Ancient Greek οἶδ’ (oîd’), οἶδα (oîda, “to know”), Albanian vizë (“line, stripe, track; dash”), Latvian veids (“form, kind, mode...
From with.
Words formed from wit
- bewit
- to wit
- unwitting
- witness
- afterwit
- brevity is the soul of wit
- collect one's wits
- dimwit
- forewit
- fuckwit
- gather one's wits
- half-wit
- have one’s wits about one
- inwit
- lackwit
- midwit
- mother wit
- native wit
- nitwit
- scare out of one’s wits
- staircase wit
- wit-cracker
- wit-cracking
- witcraft
- witful
- witless
- witling
- witter
- witticism
- wittol
- wit tooth
- witty
Phrases with wit
Words that rhyme with wit
48 more rhymesFewer rhymes
Questions about wit
- What does wit mean?
- Wit means sanity.
- What is wit in Arabic?
- Wit in Arabic is وعي, إدراك. See Wit meaning in Arabic.
- How do you use wit in a sentence?
- It is well that wit is an impalpable and ethereal substance, or it must long since have evaporated in indignation at that peculiarly wretched and mistaken race, its imitators.
- What part of speech is wit?
- Wit can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce wit?
- Wit is pronounced /wɪt/.
- What is the plural of wit?
- The plural of wit is wits.
Words near wit in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wit (page history and authors); WIT (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-us-wit.ogg.
Cite this entry: “wit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.