while

Other forms of while

plural

whiles·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about while

What does while mean?

while means "a period of indeterminate length (usually short) marked by some action or condition".

How many syllables are in while?

while has 1 syllable: while. In IPA it is /ˈwaɪl/.

What is another word for while?

Close synonyms include piece, spell, patch. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is while a common word?

while is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with while?

5 words rhyme with while. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.