Definition of whodunit
: a detective story or mystery story
variants:
or less commonly
whodunnit
Updated on: 18 Jul 2018
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whodunit was our Word of the Day on 05/18/2015. Hear the podcast!
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Recent Examples of whodunit from the Web
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The Mousetrap San Leandro Players presents Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit about a group of strangers trapped by a storm who discover that a murderer is among them.
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The real mystery of Sharp Objects is not the whodunit, but Camille herself, and all the tangled dark things inside her that are stirred up by her homecoming.
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But Sharp Objects, based on the first novel by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, turns out to be something much darker and more ambitious than your average whodunit.
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Produced by the Duplass brothers (who also made Wild, Wild Country), the docuseries goes beyond the heist itself to reveal a truly bizarre cast of characters caught up in an increasingly wild whodunit.
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For the Defense cannot resist structuring itself as a detective novel, though the whodunit is less about who killed Marion Gilchrist and more about who framed Oscar Slater.
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In The Favorite Sister, Knoll mines the rich landscape of reality television (think Real Housewives of New York) and creates a binge-worthy beach read complete with the provocative twists and turns of a whodunit.
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America’s appetite for highbrow whodunits, tabloid true crime, noir reprises, miscarriages of justice may be benign enough as a pastime.
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Curious Theatre Branch presents the world premiere of Matt Rieger's overloaded whodunit about underworld struggles with a lot of hand-wringing over morality.
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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