Whenever

How to spell whenever

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce whenever

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does whenever mean?

1. conjunctionAt any or every time that something happens; on any occasion.

Whenever in a sentence

• Whenever the printer jams, she restarts it before calling support.

• Call the office whenever you need an updated invoice.

Where does whenever come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a compound of the native English question word 'when' and the emphatic element 'ever'. The first part descends from Old English 'hwænne' or 'hwanne', meaning 'at what time', which belonged to the same family of question words as 'what', 'who' and 'where'. The second part, 'ever', comes from Old English 'æfre', meaning 'at any time' or 'always', and its job here is to broaden 'when' into 'at any time at all'. The two halves were written separately for centuries before settling into the single closed-up form 'whenever' that we use today. Because the word is simply 'when' plus 'ever' with no extra letters, the only real spelling trap is resisting the urge to insert a space or a hyphen.

How the word is built

• when (Old English hwænne: at what time)
• -ever (intensifying suffix meaning 'at any time at all')