Definify.com

Definition 2024


what_gives

what gives

English

Phrase

What gives?

  1. (colloquial) What is wrong? Why is this happening?
    Not even thirty minutes after leaving the shower, I start getting itches on my head. What gives?
  2. (colloquial, possibly dated) What is happening? What is going on?
    What gives with you and Martha?
  3. (colloquial) How are you?
  4. A more polite version of (colloquial) WTF?

See also

References

  1. Brian Joseph argues that Yiddish lacks a comparable idiom, that German communities in America in Pennsylvania and Texas lack a comparable idiom, that Americans were unlikely to borrow from standard German in the post-WWI, mid-WWII era, and that German es (’s) is unaccounted for in any case. He says: "[It may be] an inherited anomaly from earlier stages of Germanic, persisting into Modern English. This possibility is enhanced further by the fact that a cognate to the Germanic *geb- 'give' root is found in Latin habeo: 'have', which itself figures in an (admittedly late) existential construction with an impersonal form of the verb (3SG habet)."