Whatever

How to spell whatever

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce whatever

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does whatever mean?

1. pronounAnything or everything that; no matter what thing.
2. determinerOf any kind at all; used to emphasise that no exception is being made.
3. interjectionAn informal exclamation expressing indifference or dismissal of what has just been said.

Whatever in a sentence

• pronoun

  Take whatever you need from the storeroom before you leave.

• determiner

  The rescue team will help in whatever way they can.

• interjection

  He just shrugged and muttered whatever before walking away.

• pronoun

  She promised to support him in whatever he decided to do.

• determiner

  There is no reason whatever to delay the payment.

• interjection

  Her flat reply of whatever told them she had stopped caring about the argument.

Where does whatever come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Whatever is a native English compound, built from 'what' and the intensifying element 'ever'. The first part, 'what', descends from Old English 'hwæt', the neuter form of the interrogative pronoun 'hwa' meaning 'who', and it traces back through the Germanic family to the same ancestral root that gave Latin 'quod' (that, which). The second part, 'ever', comes from Old English 'æfre', meaning 'always' or 'at any time', and when attached to a question word it widens the meaning to 'no matter what' or 'anything at all'. The fused form appears in Middle English and was sometimes written as two words, 'what ever', before settling into the single solid spelling we use today. Because it is a straightforward joining of two very common words, the spelling holds no real surprises; the only thing to remember is that it is now written closed up, with a single word and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• what (interrogative/relative pronoun)
• -ever (emphatic generalising suffix)