Whydunit

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 motives for committing it.

    "Connery takes over the interrogation and in the process beats the man to death. This much we know almost from the beginning, so the film is less of a whodunit than a whydunit."

Example

More examples

"Connery takes over the interrogation and in the process beats the man to death. This much we know almost from the beginning, so the film is less of a whodunit than a whydunit."

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