Whence

Part of speech: adverb, preposition

Pronunciation: /ʍɛns/

Definitions

1. From what location or origin something arises or where a particular event or situation begins
2. The point of origin or the place from which something comes or is derived in terms of facts or situations
3. Indicating the place or source from which something originates or is derived

Etymology: "Whence" is a word that has quietly shed a piece of itself over the centuries. Its earliest ancestor in Old English was "hwanon", meaning "from where", and the modern form grew out of that by way of Middle English "whennes". The final "-s" is a remnant of an old adverbial genitive, a grammatical ending that once marked motion or direction, much as the "-s" in "always" or "besides" does. Over time that ending was dropped from most words, but "whence" kept it. The word's own internal logic is easy to see. It is built from "when" plus that "-s", which means "whence" once sat in the same family as "whence when" and related interrogative forms. Its meaning has stayed remarkably steady: it asks about origin or source, not time, even though it sounds like its cousin "when". Readers often treat "whence" as a fancier "where", but it carries the sense of "from which place" built right into its ending, so "from whence" is strictly a redundant doubling of "from" with a word that already means "from".

Synonyms: from where, from which