Where'd

How to spell where'd

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce where'd

What does where'd mean?

1. adverbA contraction of 'where did', and occasionally 'where would' or 'where had', used to ask about a place or location.

Where'd in a sentence

• Where'd you leave the car keys this morning?

• Where'd she find such a cheap flight to Rome?

Where does where'd come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern written contraction built on 'where', which descends from the Old English hwaer, an interrogative adverb of place that traces back to the same Proto-Germanic stem that gave us 'what' and 'who'. The 'where' part has meant 'in or to what place' for well over a thousand years, while the attached 'd is a clipped, apostrophe-marked form of the auxiliary verbs 'did', 'would', or 'had', collapsed onto the question word for speed of speech. Contractions like this became common in informal English writing from the 1600s onward, as printers used the apostrophe to mark the missing letters. The spelling trap is purely orthographic and entirely modern: the base 'where' is easily swapped for its homophones 'were' and 'we're', and the apostrophe is often dropped or misplaced. Remember that the apostrophe stands precisely where the letters of 'did', 'would', or 'had' were squeezed out.

How the word is built

• where (interrogative of place)
• 'd (contraction of 'did', or sometimes 'would'/'had')