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"Whatsit" stands in for a word you cannot bring to mind. You are mid-sentence, the name escapes you, so you drop in "whatsit" and carry on: "pass me the whatsit", "I put it in the whatsit, the drawer thing". Sometimes it fills the gap while you keep hunting for the real word; sometimes you never find it and the sentence just proceeds without it. It is mostly used for objects, but you will hear it for names too — "I saw old whatsit yesterday, you know, the man from the shop" — and for people there is also "whatsisname" and "whatsername", which are the same idea with the sex of the person built in. It leans British; Americans reach more often for "", "thingamajig" or "doohickey". All of them are informal, spoken English, fine with friends and family, out of place in writing. You will see it spelt "whatsit", "what's-it" or "wotsit", and the plural "whatsits" is normal.
那個什麼、那個叫什麼的(想不起名字時暫時代替的說法)
組成The question "what is it" run together into a single noun: what + is + it → whatsit.
同家族的字
- whatchamacallitbuilt the very same way, from "what you may call it" instead of "what is it"
- whatsisnamethe same trick applied to a person: "what is his name" squashed into one word
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
whatsitnoun
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A thing (used in a vague way to refer to something whose name one cannot recall, or that one is embarrassed to say)
- Pass me one of those whatsits, will you?
資料來源:英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary(CC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。