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The Learning Kingdom's Cool Word of the Day for July 29, 1999
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wit [n. WIT]
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Wit can be simple intelligence, or it can be the ability to use
intelligence in an ingeniously humorous way. The word also may
appear in the plural as wits, where it refers to keenness of
perception and ingenuity, or to soundness of mind. Finally, a person
can be a wit if he or she possesses wit in one of the first two
senses described above.
All of these meanings have to do with intelligence, knowing, and
sensing. The original meaning was sensory, from the ancient root
weid- (to see). Our words visible and vision came from this root.
In Old English, wit was mind, judgment, and sense, leading to the
expressions "keep your wits about you" and scared out of my wits."
There is also the nearly obsolete expression "to wit," which means
"that is to say," or "in other words." In this phrase, wit is a
contraction of witness, a verb that sprang from Old English witan,
from the same ancient root.
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