Wee

How to spell wee

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wee

What does wee mean?

1. adjectiveVery small in size or amount; tiny.
2. adjectiveUsed of the very early hours just after midnight.

Wee in a sentence

• The cottage had a wee kitchen with barely room for two people.

• They talked until the wee small hours of the morning.

• She poured a wee drop of milk into the coffee.

• His flight landed in the wee hours when the airport was deserted.

Where does wee come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wee began life in Old English as 'wǣge', a noun naming a weight or a measured quantity, and by Middle English it had narrowed to the phrase 'a we', meaning a little bit or a small amount. The shift from noun to adjective happened in the north of Britain, where 'a we thing' (a small amount of a thing) was reinterpreted as 'a wee thing', and the modern adjectival sense of 'tiny' took hold strongly in Scots and northern English from the 1400s onward. The familiar doubled vowel spelling settled later simply to mark the long 'ee' sound clearly and to keep it distinct from the pronoun 'we'. The childish sense of urinating is much younger and quite separate in feel: it is an imitative nursery word recorded from the early twentieth century, probably echoing baby talk rather than the old measurement root. That double origin is worth remembering, because the spelling is identical even though the two meanings travelled by very different paths.

How the word is built

• wee (a single root meaning 'small'; originally a noun for a small amount, later an adjective)

Words that sound like wee

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• we: The first-person plural pronoun, used by a speaker to refer to themselves together with one or more other people.