Definition of whodunit
: a detective story or mystery story
variants:
or less commonly
whodunnit
Updated on: 12 Apr 2018
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Recent Examples of whodunit from the Web
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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.
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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.
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Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol' Mark Twain’s A Double-Barreled Detective Story is a novella-length parody of whodunits.
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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.
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Christie's adaptation of her popular short story premiered in London in 1953, and the whodunit has been keeping audiences guessing ever since.
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Wind River did reasonably well at the box office and earned critical praise, but the whodunit is hardly a slam dunk for nominations.
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What starts out as an investigation into the suicide of a man — whose depression and anxiety seemed to be lifting just before his death — turns into a whodunit.
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Top of the Lake: China Girl Like its 2013 predecessor, co-writers Jane Campion and Gerard Lee's crime drama isn't simply a whodunit for Elisabeth Moss's cracking-at-the-seams detective to solve.
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.
Origin and Etymology of whodunit
alteration of who done it?
WHODUNIT Defined for English Language Learners
Definition of whodunit for English Language Learners
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: a novel, play, or movie about a murder where you do not know who committed the murder until the end
Learn More about whodunit
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Spanish Central: Translation of whodunit Nglish: Translation of whodunit for Spanish speakers
Seen and Heard
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