Wee-wee

Meaning

A nursery euphemism for urine or urination.

Origin

Eric Partridge records this in his A Dictionary of Slang, 1937, as "Wee-wee, a urination; esp. do a wee-wee" and considers it to be late 19th century.

Reduplications that are formed from repeating words like this are symptomatic of the infantile way that youngsters used to be spoken to. For example, choo-choo, goody-goody etc. This fashion is changing rather and such terms are becoming less commonly used.

Wee, and Wee-wee, may well be variant of pee. That itself is a jokey euphemism and appears to derive from the 'P' in piss. Shakespeare seems to use it that way in Twelfth Night, 1601:

"By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's, and thus makes she her great P's."

Never shy of recycling a good old joke, Talbot Rothwell, the screenwriter of most of the Carry On series of films, used this one again in Carry On Camping. A sign on a field gate says 'All asses must be shown'. Sid James approaches the gate:

Are you the owner of this site?
No.
Where is he?
Gone for a P.

See also - other reduplicated phrases.

See other phrases and sayings from Shakespeare.