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wit

Pronunciation: /wɪt/

The English word “wit” has 8 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. Sanity.
  2. The senses.
  3. Intellectual ability; faculty of thinking, reasoning.
  4. The ability to think quickly; mental cleverness, especially under short time constraints.
  5. Intelligence; common sense.
  6. Humour, especially when clever or quick.
  7. A person who tells funny anecdotes or jokes; someone witty.

verb

  1. To know, be aware of (constructed with of when used intransitively).

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…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.