Wee
adj, name, noun, pron, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A short time or short distance.
- 2 Urine. colloquial, uncountable
- 3 Abbreviation of Western equine encephalomyelitis. abbreviation, alt-of, uncountable
- 4 a short time wordnet
- 5 An act of urination. colloquial, countable
"I need to have a wee."
- 1 To urinate. UK, colloquial
"I need to wee! I can't hold it any longer!"
- 2 eliminate urine wordnet
- 1 Small, little. Ireland, New-Zealand, Northern-England, Scotland
"You looked a little cold, so I lit a wee fire."
- 1 very early wordnet
- 2 (used informally) little or tiny wordnet
- 1 obsolete emphatic of we alt-of, emphatic, obsolete, personal, pronoun
"Yet lest wee should be Capernaitans, as wee are told there that the flesh profiteth nothing, so wee are told heer, if we be not as deaf as adders, that this union of the flesh proceeds from the union of a fit help and solace."
- 1 A surname. countable, uncountable
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I'm bursting for a wee and I can't find a washroom."
Etymology
From Middle English wey, weygh, wegh, weȝe, wæȝe (“little bit”), from Old English wǣġ, wǣġe (“weight”), from Proto-West Germanic *wāgu, from Proto-Germanic *wēgō (“scales, weight”) and *wēgǭ (“weight”), related to Middle English weġan (“to move, weigh”) (15c).
Onomatopoeic for the sound of urination. The noun derives from the verb.
* see we
Borrowed from Hokkien 黃／黄 (Ûiⁿ), etc.
Related phrases
More for "wee"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.