Howdunit

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A type of detective story in which the focus is not on the person who committed the crime, but on the manner in which it was committed.

    "After half a century, the whodunit was joined by the howdunit, in which the emphasis swung from the identity of the murderer to the method by which the murder was committed."

Example

More examples

"After half a century, the whodunit was joined by the howdunit, in which the emphasis swung from the identity of the murderer to the method by which the murder was committed."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.