Noun: why
| Singular | why |
| Plural | whys; why's; whies |
Sample Sentences
-
A good article will cover the who, the what, the when, the where, the why and the how.
-
I don't want to know the whys or the wherefores of your decision.
-
Within months of leaving, she became the new owner of Dream Body Recovery in Miami, which has three rooms that can accommodate up to six clients. “Being a part of this journey with other ladies, knowing how it changed my life, that’s my why,” she told me. [2022 May 11, Sandra E. Garcia, “Butt Lifts Are Booming. Healing Is No Joke.”, in The New York Times Magazine:]
Nouns inflected like why
why,
Etymology
1. From Middle English why, from Old English hwȳ (“why”), from Proto-Germanic *hwī (“by what, how”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷey, instrumental case of *kʷís (“who”), *kʷid (“what”).
2. Cognate with Old Saxon hwī (“why”), hwiu (“how; why”), Middle High German wiu (“how, why”), archaic Danish and Norwegian Bokmål hvi (“why”), Norwegian Nynorsk kvi (“why”), Swedish vi (“why”), Faroese and Icelandic hví (“why”), Latin quī (“why”), Doric Greek πεῖ (peî, “where”), Ukrainian чи (čy, “if”), Polish czy, Czech či (“or”), Serbo-Croatian či (“if”). Compare Old English þȳ (“because, since, on that account, therefore, then”, literally “by that, for that”). See thy. See: Norwegian Nynorsk Nouns '
kvi'.