wit

CEFRB2

/wɪt/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

  1. 01

    noun

    The ability to use words quickly and cleverly to make people laugh.

  2. 02

    noun

    Extra detail

    Intellectual ability; faculty of thinking, reasoning.

Examples

  • Wit is to conversation what salt is to food.

  • Brevity is the soul of wit.

At a glance

Sits at B2 on the CEFR scale

Senses
5
Parts of speech
1
Citations
5
Synonyms
1

Deep Dive

noun

Extra meanings

  1. The senses.

  2. The ability to think quickly; mental cleverness, especially under short time constraints.

  3. Intelligence; common sense.

More examples

In context

  • Wit gives zest to conversation.

  • He's gone completely out of his wits.

  • Where she has gone to is beyond the wit of man to say.

Synonyms

Quick test

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Quick check

Her sharp blank made the boring meeting become suddenly very entertaining for everyone.

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

Nearby

Origin

noun

From Middle English wit, witt, wyt, from Old English witt (“mind, sanity, sense, understanding”), from Proto-West Germanic *witi, from Proto-Germanic *witją (“knowledge; reason; wit”), from Proto-Germanic *witaną (“to know”), from Proto-Indo-European *wóyde (“to know”), from *weyd- (“to see”). Cognates Cognate with Dutch wit (“knowledge”), German and Luxembourgish Witz (“joke; humour, wit”), Low German Weet (“knowledge; idea; inkling”), Yiddish וויץ (vits, “joke”), Danish vid (“wit”), Faroese and Icelandic vit (“intelligence, wits; reason, sense; knowledge; awareness, sentience”), Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish vett (“intelligence, sense, wit”), Norwegian Nynorsk vett, vit (“sense, wits”), Go...