Whole

How to spell whole

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce whole

What does whole mean?

1. adjectiveComplete in extent or amount, with no part missing or left out.
2. nounA complete thing made up of all its parts considered together.

Whole in a sentence

• adjective

  She read the whole report before the meeting started.

• noun

  The separate departments form a single working whole.

• adjective

  The children ate a whole loaf of bread between them.

• noun

  Taken as a whole, the budget looks balanced.

Where does whole come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English hal, which meant 'healthy', 'sound', or 'uninjured', the same root that gives us 'hale' as in 'hale and hearty' and the greeting 'hail'. Its original sense was bodily wholeness, an unbroken and healthy state, and from there it widened to mean 'complete' or 'entire'. The most striking feature is the w- at the front, which was not there originally and is never pronounced; scribes in the fifteenth century began adding it, probably reflecting a rounded way of saying the opening vowel in some dialects. That decorative, silent w- is exactly why the word is so easily confused in writing with its homophone 'hole'. The same hal root also survives in 'health', 'heal', and 'wholesome', all of which still carry the idea of being sound and unbroken.

How the word is built

• whole (from Old English hal: healthy, complete, unhurt); the silent w- was added in spelling around the 1400s

Words that sound like whole

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• hole: A hollow space or gap in or through a solid object or surface.