What's

How to spell what's

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce what's

What does what's mean?

1. otherA contraction of 'what is' or 'what has', used in questions and statements about a thing, situation, or possession.

What's in a sentence

• Nobody could tell her what's wrong with the printer this morning.

• Nobody knows what's happened to the missing invoice

Where does what's come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a contraction of 'what is' or 'what has', joining the ancient interrogative word 'what' to a shortened form of the verb. 'What' descends from Old English 'hwaet', a neuter question word that meant 'what thing' and belonged to the same family as the words 'who' and 'why'; it traces back to a Germanic root and ultimately to the same Indo-European source that gave Latin 'quod' (meaning 'what' or 'which'). The contracted ending '-'s' stands in for either 'is' or 'has', and the apostrophe marks the letters that have been dropped, much as it does in 'it's' and 'he's'. Written contractions like this one spread in English from around the 1500s onward as the apostrophe became the standard way to flag missing letters. The whole spelling trap lives in that apostrophe: leaving it out turns the word into the meaningless 'whats', and confusing it with 'whose' or 'whats' is the usual adult slip.

How the word is built

• what (interrogative pronoun)
• 's (contracted 'is' or 'has')