Other forms: wits
Wit is quick clever humour, or sharp intelligence. A dry wit, quick-witted, keep your wits about you.
The older sense is the mind itself, which is what survives in wits, half-wit and at your wits' end. The humour sense is about speed as much as content, since a joke thought of an hour later is not wit.
1nounwitQuick clever humour, or sharp intelligence.
“His speech was full of wit, and the guests laughed all the way through.”
wit is a humour.
Old English witt means mind or understanding, from witan, to know.
Proto-Indo-European
*weyd-
Middle English
wit — mind
English, today
wit
Built from
From Middle English wit (“mind”). From Middle English wit, witt, wyt, from Old English witt (“mind, sanity, sense, understanding”), from Proto-West Germanic witi, from Proto-Germanic witją (“knowledge; reason; wit”), from Proto-Germanic witaną (“to know”), from Proto-Indo-European wóyde (“to know”), from weyd- (“to see”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA