whodunit

noun who·dun·it \ hü-ˈdə-nət \

variants: or less commonly whodunnit

|Updated on: 6 Jun 2018

Editor's Note: Did You Know?

Definition of whodunit

: a detective story or mystery story

See whodunit defined for English-language learners

See whodunit defined for kids

whodunit was our Word of the Day on 05/18/2015. Hear the podcast!

Recent Examples of whodunit from the Web

America’s appetite for highbrow whodunits, tabloid true crime, noir reprises, miscarriages of justice may be benign enough as a pastime.

— jill leovy, New York Times, "The Killers of the ‘Sex Money Murder’ Gang and the Cops Who Went After Them," 1 June 2018
Curious Theatre Branch presents the world premiere of Matt Rieger's overloaded whodunit about underworld struggles with a lot of hand-wringing over morality.

— dmitry samarov, Chicago Reader, "Crossing Aviva might be enjoyable if it left any room to breathe," 11 May 2018
Book by book, Balliett has created her own genre: whodunits with a heart, featuring kids at the helm.

— chicagotribune.com, "'Out of the Wild Night': With a splish and a splot and a shree, here comes a ghostly whodunit with heart," 20 Mar. 2018
Murder on the Orient Express An all-star cast keeps this classic whodunit steaming down the train tracks, steered by Kenneth Branagh, who directs and stars as handlebar-mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot.

— chris ball, cleveland.com, "Greta Gerwig's 'Lady Bird,' now on DVD and Blu-ray (review)," 16 Mar. 2018
Louisville and Adidas now play starring roles in a Department of Justice production, equal parts taut thriller and whodunit centering on alleged widespread and systematic bribing of basketball recruits.

— michael mccann and jon wertheim, SI.com, "Adidas's Loyalty to Louisville Goes Beyond the Terms of Its Contract," 21 Mar. 2018
Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol' Mark Twain’s A Double-Barreled Detective Story is a novella-length parody of whodunits.

— Newsweek, "Amazing Photos of Bioluminescent Phytoplankton," 14 Mar. 2018
Great Lakes has faced the thriller conundrum before, particularly with its run of Agatha Christie whodunits, the outcomes of which many of us have known since high school English class.

— andrea simakis, cleveland.com, "'Misery' at Great Lakes Theater: Despite top-notch cast and a spooky set, it's under rather than over-the-top (review)," 22 Feb. 2018
Christie's adaptation of her popular short story premiered in London in 1953, and the whodunit has been keeping audiences guessing ever since.

— andrea simakis, cleveland.com, "Great Lakes Theater's 2018-19 season to showcase powerful women, from 'Pride and Prejudice' to 'Mama Mia!' (preview)," 4 Feb. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'whodunit.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

In 1930, Donald Gordon, a book reviewer for News of Books, needed to come up with something to say about a rather unremarkable mystery novel called Half-Mast Murder. "A satisfactory whodunit," he wrote. The coinage played fast and loose with spelling and grammar, but "whodunit" caught on anyway. Other writers tried respelling it "who-done-it," and one even insisted on using "whodidit," but those sanitized versions lacked the punch of the original and have fallen by the wayside. "Whodunit" became so popular that by 1939 at least one language pundit had declared it "already heavily overworked" and predicted it would "soon be dumped into the taboo bin." History has proven that prophecy false, and "whodunit" is still going strong.