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, 16 Apr. 2025
An earlier episode of Yellowjackets revealed Lottie’s death in present day as a mystery, setting up a whodunit for the remainder of the season.
—Jackie Strause, HollywoodReporter, 15 Apr. 2025
If Adolescence remains a one-season event, its final message will be as its creators intended: not as a whodunit but as a warning.
—Josh Hammer, MSNBC Newsweek, 1 Apr. 2025
After plenty of twists, turns and red herrings, the killer in Netflix’s newest whodunit series The Residence is finally exposed in the season 1 finale.
—Lynsey Eidell, People.com, 22 Mar. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Whodunit.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whodunit. Accessed 22 Apr. 2025.
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whodunit
noun
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