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what gives. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
what gives, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
what gives in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
what gives you have here. The definition of the word
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English
Etymology
First attested in 1940, in John O'Hara's novel Pal Joey. The term is considered by the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, Second Edition (2013) and several other references to be a calque of German “was gibt's?” and/or a Yiddish equivalent. Brian Joseph considers this unlikely, however, and speculates that despite its extremely late attestation, it and the German was gibt's may "allow for a reconstruction of a Proto-West-Germanic existential use of 'give', which survives marginally into present usage."
Phrase
what gives?
- (colloquial) What is wrong? Why is this happening?
Not even thirty minutes after leaving the shower, my head starts itching. What gives?
- (colloquial) What is happening? What is going on?
What gives with you and Martha?
- (colloquial) How are you?
See also
References
- ^ 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: " 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)."