[f. next.]
1. An act, or the action, of whizzing; a sibilant sound somewhat less shrill than a hiss, and having a trace of musical tone like a buzz; a swift movement producing such a sound.
1620. T. Granger, Div. Logike, 201*. Through skies by night shee flingeth, and Her whizze earth’s darknesse teares.
1682. Bunyan, Holy War, 74. Their shot would go by their ears with a Whizz.
1713. Guardian, No. 92, ¶ 5. He never once Duck’d at the whizz of a Cannon Ball.
1798. Coleridge, Anc. Mar., III. xvii. Like the whizz of my cross-bow.
1848. Mrs. Gaskell, Mary Barton, xxvi. The … whiz and scream of the arriving trains.
c. 1850. ‘Dow Jr.,’ in Jerdan, Yankee Hum. (1853), 78. Shall we lumber along the road, and allow other nations to pass us with a whiz?
1897. Meredith, Amazing Marr., ix. Amid a whizz of scythe-blades.
2. U.S. slang. An agreement, ‘bargain.’
The relation to sense 1 is not clear.
1869. ‘Mark Twain,’ Innoc. Abr., xl. They said, each to his fellow, Let us sleep here … And each … said, It is a whiz. Ibid. (1876), Tom Sawyer, xxxiv. ‘If we don’t find it, I’ll agree to give you my drum and everything I’ve got.’… ‘All right—it’s a whiz.’
1888. New York Times, 30 Dec., 13/4. ‘You will have to play that you are a boy, that I am master, and then we will have a time. Is it a whizz?’ he asked.
I assured him that it was a whizz, rightly interpreting that strange word to mean a go, or agreed to.
