whodunit
noun
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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 relatively new term (introduced only a year earlier) 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 fell 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.
Examples of whodunit in a Sentence
Katie Campione, Deadline, 26 May 2026
Iqbal stars in the whodunit series as romantic lead Ravi Singh, who in Season One teams up with Pip, a 17-year-old who investigates a local murder case involving Ravi’s brother.
—Kristen Tauer, Footwear News, 26 May 2026
Not unlike an Agatha Christie whodunit, but featuring katanas instead of poison and revolvers, the stories all depict a seemingly impossible crime Murashige has to somehow solve.
—Jordan Mintzer, HollywoodReporter, 24 May 2026
Netflix has numerous murder mysteries available to stream, ranging from Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunits Glass Onion (2022) and Wake Up Dead Man (2025), and cozy mysteries like The Thursday Murder Club (2025).
—Kevin Jacobsen, Entertainment Weekly, 22 May 2026
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Cite this Entry
“Whodunit.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whodunit. Accessed 4 Jun. 2026.
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whodunit
noun
