WHENCE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does whence mean? 

• WHENCE (adverb)
  The adverb WHENCE has 1 sense:

1. from what place, source, or cause

  Familiarity information: WHENCE used as an adverb is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• WHENCE (adverb)

Sense 1

Meaning:

From what place, source, or cause

 Context examples 

Then the peasants were astonished, and said: Peasant, from whence do you come?

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

Thy people took us in by their fires and made us warm, nor asked whence or why we wandered.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

I assured him, “that he must be mistaken by almost half, for I had not left the country whence I came above two hours before I dropped into the sea.”

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

There was no sign of a place whence it had been taken.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I had heard it—where, or whence, for ever impossible to know!

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

When the party broke up, Lydia returned with Mrs. Forster to Meryton, from whence they were to set out early the next morning.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

True, we did not know whence, or how, or when, the bolt would come; but I think we all expected that something strange would happen.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

Some weeks afterwards I learned incidentally that my friend spent a day at Windsor, whence he returned with a remarkably fine emerald tie-pin.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The dense mob of ape-men ran about in bewilderment, marveling whence this storm of death was coming or what it might mean.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)