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

Recent Examples on the Web

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Part horror, part whodunit, the film follows the police, the FBI, and a pair of entomologists, more specifically myrmecologists, who team up to stop the ants from killing everyone in Los Angeles. —

Salama Udaipurwala, JSTOR Daily, 30 Oct. 2024 The film's narrative structure plays out much like Friday the 13th (1980) as a horror/whodunit with the identity of the prowler remaining a secret until the end of the movie. —

Steven Thrash, EW.com, 19 Oct. 2024 Nearly three decades after six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was killed, Netflix has announced a three-part documentary examining the whodunit murder investigation. —

Kalia Richardson, Rolling Stone, 4 Nov. 2024 But like any whodunit, F Marry Kill's not giving up the goods that easily. —

Lester Fabian Brathwaite, EW.com, 30 Oct. 2024 See all Example Sentences for whodunit