Whole means with nothing missing and nothing taken out. The whole cake, the whole class, the whole afternoon. All of it, edge to edge.
It also means in one piece: a snake swallows an egg whole, and wholemeal flour keeps the whole grain. As a noun it wants 'the', as in 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts', and 'as a whole' means taken all together. 'On the whole' means all things considered: 'On the whole, it went well.' Whole sits with a singular countable noun, the whole day, the whole family, where 'all' puts 'the' after itself instead, all the students. And it sounds exactly like 'hole', which is how the wrong one ends up typed.
1adjectivewholeComplete, with no part left out.~47%
“She spent the whole morning on one email.”
2adjectivecutIn one piece; not cut up or broken.~29%
“Cook the fish whole, with the head on.”
3nounitselfA thing complete in itself; all of something taken together.~24%
“The four movements make a whole.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: entire, complete
Whole was hāl in Old English, and it meant healthy and safe. Behind it stand Proto-Germanic *hailaz, 'whole, safe, sound', and Proto-Indo-European *kéh₂ilos, 'healthy, whole', so the oldest idea in the word is not counting but soundness, a thing unhurt. The w is a latecomer: a southwestern pronunciation put it into the spelling around 1400 and it stayed, partly to keep whole apart from hole.
Middle English
hol
English, today
whole
Built from
From Middle English hol. From Middle English whol, hol, hole (“healthy, unhurt, whole”), from Old English hāl (“healthy, safe”), from Proto-West Germanic hail, from Proto-Germanic hailaz (“whole, safe, sound”), from Proto-Indo-European kéh₂ilos (“healthy, whole”). The spelling with wh-, attested since ca. 1400, represents an excrescent, which developed in words with initial in southwestern dialects of -. While this pronunciation did not establish itself in the standard language (except in one), the spelling survived in whole and whore, in the former case likely reinforced by a desire to disambiguate from hole.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA