means The capacity to perceive and express clever, surprising connections between ideas, usually fast and usually funny.

from From Old English 'witt,' meaning the mind, understanding, or intelligence — the seat of thought itself, related to the verb 'witan,' to know (which still echoes in 'unwitting' and 'to wit'). It belongs to a broad Germanic family and is a distant cousin of Latin 'videre,' to see, and Sanskrit 'veda,' knowledge — the deep idea being that to know is to see clearly. For centuries 'wit' simply meant intellect; only later did it narrow toward the quick, clever, comic sense we favor now, as if the whole mind had been sharpened to a single bright edge.