Whereabouts

How to spell whereabouts

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce whereabouts

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does whereabouts mean?

1. nounThe place where someone or something is located, especially when it is not precisely known.
2. adverbIn or near what place; roughly where.

Whereabouts in a sentence

• noun

  The police asked neighbours about the suspect's whereabouts.

• adverb

  Whereabouts on the map did the accident happen?

• noun

  Nobody at the office knew the missing files' whereabouts.

• adverb

  He could not recall whereabouts he had parked the car.

Where does whereabouts come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a compound built entirely from native English parts: the question word 'where', which goes back to Old English 'hwaer' meaning 'in what place', and 'about', from Old English 'onbutan' meaning 'on the outside of' or 'around'. The two were joined in the late medieval period, and the trailing '-s' was added in the same way it attaches to words like 'towards' and 'besides', giving an adverbial flavour rather than a true plural. By the seventeenth century 'whereabouts' was being used both as an adverb asking roughly where something lay and as a noun meaning the place a person or thing happens to be. The spelling trap is the silent join in the middle: the word is one solid run with no space and no hyphen, and the unstressed middle 'a' of 'about' is easy to garble.

How the word is built

• where (in what place)
• about (around, near)
• -s (adverbial/plural-style ending)