whole
/hoʊl/
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.46 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
From which none of its constituents has been removed.
noun
An entirety.
Example Sentences
- "I ate a whole fish."
- "During the whole time of his abode in the university he generally spent thirteen hours of the day in study; by which assiduity besides an exact dispatch of the whole course of philosophy, he read over in a manner all classic authors that are extant[…]"
- "Athelstan Arundel walked home all the way, foaming and raging. […] He walked the whole way, walking through crowds, and under the noses of dray-horses, carriage-horses, and cart-horses, without taking the least notice of them."
- "A traveller in 1887 describes the difference between the peoples found when crossing the frontier in the Ichow prefecture. In Kiangsu he had been met by rudeness and obstruction, on his entering Shantung, at the very first village he was received with courtesy and even kindness, and he found the same feelings expressed through the whole province."
- "“[…] She takes the whole thing with desperate seriousness. But the others are all easy and jovial—thinking about the good fare that is soon to be eaten, about the hired fly, about anything.”"
- "Floods in northern India, mostly in the small state of Uttarakhand, have wrought disaster on an enormous scale. The early, intense onset of the monsoon on June 14th swelled rivers, washing away roads, bridges, hotels and even whole villages."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *kéh₂ilos Proto-Germanic *hailaz Proto-West Germanic *hail Old English hāl Middle English hol English whole From Middle English whol, hol, hole (“healthy, unhurt, whole”), from Old English hāl (“healthy, safe”), from Proto-West Germanic *hail, from Proto-Germanic *hailaz (“whole, safe, sound”), from Proto-Indo-European *kéh₂ilos (“healthy, whole”). The spelling with wh-, attested since ca. 1400, represents an excrescent /w/, which developed in words with initial /(h)ɔː/, /(h)oː/ in southwestern dialects of Middle English. While this pronunciation did not establish itself in the standard language (except in one), the spelling survived in whole and whore, in the former case likely reinforced by a desire to disambiguate from hole. Cognates Compare West Frisian hiel, Low German heel/heil, Dutch heel, German heil, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål hel, Norwegian Nynorsk heil; also Welsh coel (“omen”), Breton kel (“omen, mention”), Old Prussian kails (“healthy”), Old Church Slavonic цѣлъ (cělŭ, “healthy, unhurt”). Related to hale, health, hail, hallow, heal, and holy. False cognate of Ancient Greek ὅλος (hólos).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /hoʊl/
- British English: /həʊl/
Usage
Inflected Forms
wholer (comparative)
more whole (comparative)
wholest (superlative)
most whole (superlative)
hole (alternative, obsolete)
wholes (plural)