whodunit

noun

who·dun·it hü-ˈdə-nət

variants or less commonly whodunnit

: a detective story or mystery story

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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

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While still a student at Bennington, Tartt had begun The Secret History, a modern classic: the last word in chic whodunits and the definitive campus novel. —

Lili Anolik, Vulture, 12 Nov. 2024 The caper is as bubbly as an Aperol spritz on a hot Lake Como day, with Sandler and Aniston’s charm and comedic chemistry keeping the whodunit going. —

Tanya Melendez, EW.com, 2 Nov. 2024 But in July, the occultist serial-killer whodunit Longlegs surpassed Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite to become Neon’s top-grossing film of all time as well as this year’s most successful indie release (its global cumulative tally stands at $108.5 million). —

Chris Lee, Vulture, 31 Oct. 2024 Playwright Steven Dietz’s comic adaptation of the Agatha Christie whodunit sets Hercule Poirot to work solving a case at a private golf club in Merlinville-sur-Mer. —

Jessica Gelt, Los Angeles Times, 14 Oct. 2024 See all Example Sentences for whodunit