A whit is the smallest amount there could be: a speck, a crumb, the least bit imaginable. It turns up almost only in the negative, as in he was not a whit sorry, or it did not help one whit.
Whit is old-fashioned and a little literary, so you will find it in novels far more than in conversation. It nearly always follows not: not a whit, not one whit, never a whit. The single positive survivor is every whit, meaning entirely, as in every whit as good as the original, which sounds older still. Keep it apart from wit, without the h, which is quickness and humour, and from the Whit in Whitsun, which is a different word again. The everyday way to say it is not the slightest bit.
1nounwhitThe smallest possible amount; the least bit.
“The apology did not make her a whit less angry.”
whit is a very small amount.
WHIT → a BIT, and it rhymes
The plate comes back so clean that there is not a bit of food left on it, not one drop, nothing at all to scrape off with a knife.
hooks ontobit
Whit began as Old English wiht, a wide word for a thing, a creature, a being, anything at all. It came from Proto-Germanic *wihtą, thing or creature, and beyond that from Proto-Indo-European *wekti-, cause or thing. The same Old English word gave wight, the creature that stalks through old poems and fantasy novels. Whit is its shrunken twin, worn down from any thing at all to the smallest thing there is.
Proto-Indo-European
*wekti- — cause, sake, thing
Proto-Germanic
*wihtą — thing, creature
Old English
wiht — wight, person, creature, being, whit, thing, something, anything
Middle English
wiȝt
English, today
whit
Built from
From Middle English wiȝt, wight, from Old English wiht (“wight, person, creature, being, whit, thing, something, anything”), from Proto-Germanic wihtą (“thing, creature”) or wihtiz (“essence, object”), from Proto-Indo-European wekti- (“cause, sake, thing”), from wekʷ- (“to say, tell”). Cognate with Old High German wiht (“creature, thing”), Dutch wicht, German Wicht. a doublet of wight.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA