whodunit

noun

who·​dun·​it hü-ˈdə-nət 

variants or less commonly whodunnit

: a detective story or mystery story

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 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

Recent Examples on the Web

Solving this peculiar whodunit is anything but predictable, and the case consumes seasoned detective Homer (Richard Jenkins) as well as young crimes officer Jodie (Joy Sunday). —Yvonne Villarreal, Los Angeles Times, 6 Mar. 2026

The Paralympics have barely started but there’s already a whodunit sweeping the world of curling. —Charlotte Carroll, New York Times, 4 Mar. 2026

The engine driving Season 1 is gone, and Season 2 doesn’t cook up another whodunit to fill the gap. —Ben Travers, IndieWire, 23 Feb. 2026

Though the darkness of the material never swamps the comedy, a balance McGee calibrated deliberately — less interested in the whodunit than in the women fumbling through it. —Kennedy French, Variety, 18 Feb. 2026

Word History

Etymology

alteration of who done it?

First Known Use

1929, in the meaning defined above

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Kids Definition

whodunit

noun

who·​dun·​it hü-ˈdən-ət 

: a detective or mystery story presented as a novel, play, or motion picture