This mini episode teaches you the fun and nonstandard expression “Who’da thunk it?”
Episode 176 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the fun and nonstandard expression “Who’da thunk it?” Send your questions about English and your suggestions for future episodes to EverybodyESL@gmail.com! (And let me know if you’d like to record the introduction to a future episode.)
In this episode, I am going to teach you a strange and fun expression. And that expression is “Who'da thunk it?” Who’da thunk it?
Now, that might not even sound like English to you. But let me spell it for you, and then we will talk about it. “Who'da thunk it?” is who’da: w-h-o-apostrophe-d-a, thunk: t-h-u-n-k, it: i-t. "Who’da thunk it?"
Before I tell you what this means and how and where you can use it, let's look at the parts so that we can understand them. Let's look at that first part: who’da. What does that mean? Where does it come from? Who’da is an abbreviated or contracted form of “who would have.” Who’da comes from “who would have.”
I'm sure that you are familiar with similar contractions like shoulda or woulda, which are shortened forms of should have and would have. Here, with who’da, we see something that is an even more extreme contraction, where the three words "who would have" get shortened or compressed or squeezed into who’da. So who’da is short for “who would have.”
All right, but what about thunk? What is thunk? Thunk is a nonstandard and humorous-sounding past participle of think. Instead of saying something like “I had never thought that,” I guess you could say, “I had never thunk that.” Thunk is just a funny-sounding past participle form of think. You really will not hear the word thunk very often. Maybe you will only hear it in the entire expression “Who'da thunk it?”
Okay, so now we can see that “Who’da thunk it” is an abbreviated or nonstandard version of “Who would have thought it?” That might seem strange to you—just trust me: that's where it comes from.
What does it mean to say “Who'da thunk it?” What it means is “That is strange, that is unusual, that was unexpected. Who would have thought that something like that would have happened? Who would have predicted it? Who would have expected it? Who would be familiar with something like that?”
The whole phrase is a way of expressing surprise or confusion. If you learn something that is very strange or surprising to you, if you learn something that seems to contradict what you already knew or what you already assumed, you can say, “Who’da thunk it?” In other words: “How surprising, that is so surprising, it’s so strange or unexpected that I would not think that anybody had ever thought that. Or that anybody would have ever assumed that. Or that anybody would have ever known that. If you learn something that is very surprising or that contradicts what you already thought or assumed or believed about something, you can say, “Who'da thunk it?”
And even if you don't use that expression, even if you don't want to use an expression that sounds so strange or has all of these nonstandard forms, I still think it's important for you to be familiar with this expression. Because you might hear it in conversation, and now you will know what it means.
“Who'da thunk it?” A strange and funny expression that I think you should know.