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say it: hohl
whole is an adjective, noun and adverb meaning "including all components without exception; being one unit or constituting the full amount or extent or duration; complete". It carries 8 recorded senses.
including all components without exception; being one unit or constituting the full amount or extent or duration; complete
“gave his whole attention”
“a whole wardrobe for the tropics”
“the whole hog”
“a whole week”
“the baby cried the whole trip home”
“a whole loaf of bread”
an assemblage of parts that is regarded as a single entity
“how big is that part compared to the whole?”
“the team is a unit”
to a complete degree or to the full or entire extent (`whole' is often used informally for `wholly')
“he was wholly convinced”
“entirely satisfied with the meal”
“it was completely different from what we expected”
“was completely at fault”
“a totally new situation”
“the directions were all wrong”
“it was not altogether her fault”
“an altogether new approach”
“a whole new idea”
“she felt right at home”
“he fell right into the trap”
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.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for whole come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.