wit
Meanings
- Sanity.
- The senses.
- Intellectual ability; faculty of thinking, reasoning.
- The ability to think quickly; mental cleverness, especially under short time constraints.
- Intelligence; common sense.
- Humour, especially when clever or quick.
- A person who tells funny anecdotes or jokes; someone witty.
- To know, be aware of (constructed with of when used intransitively).
- Pronunciation spelling of with.
- Initialism of waterfowl identification test.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
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”), Gothic 𐌿𐌽𐍅𐌹𐍄𐌹 (unwiti, “folly, ignorance”); also Breton gouzout (“to know”), Cornish godhvos, goffos (“to know”), Irish feadair (“to know”), Welsh gwybod (“to know”), Latin videō (“to see”), Ancient Greek οἶδ’ (oîd’), οἶδα (oîda, “to know”), Albanian vizë (“line, stripe, track; dash”), Latvian veids (“form, kind, mode, type”), Lithuanian veidas (“face; front; appearance, aspect, look”), Belarusian ве́даць (vjédacʹ, “to know”), Bulgarian вям (vjam, “to know”), Czech vědět (“to know”), Polish wiedzieć (“to know”), Russian ве́дать (védatʹ, “to know”), Serbo-Croatian vedeti, viedieti (“to know”), Slovak vedieť (“to know”), Slovene vedeti (“to know”), Ukrainian ві́дати (vídaty, “to know; to deal, manage”), Armenian գիտեմ (gitem, “I know”), գիտենալ (gitenal), գիտնալ (gitnal, “to know”), Avestan 𐬬𐬀𐬉𐬛 (vaēd, “find”), 𐬬𐬌𐬛 (vid, “know, understand”), Persian نوید (navid / nawīd, nuwēd, “invitation; annunciation; good news”), Tocharian A ime (“awareness, consciousness, memory, thought”), Tocharian B īme (“awareness, consciousness, memory, thought”), ūwe (“educated, knowledgeable, learned”), Sanskrit विद् (vid, “to know; to find; to consider as”). Compare wise.