Word.ws English Dictionary

chelp

chelp verb: to gossip, particularly in a forthright manner.

Verb

chelp (third-person singular simple present chelps, present participle chelping, simple past and past participle chelped)

  1. (Northern England, intransitive) To gossip, particularly in a forthright manner.
    • He's not here so we are chelping in the staffroom and ignoring the to-do list on the board.
    • Who’s laugh’d at too by every whelp,
      For failings which she cannot help?
      But silly fools will laugh and chelp,
      My Mary.1820, John Clare, “My Mary” in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, London: Taylor and Hessey, p. 87
  2. (Northern England, intransitive) To speak rudely or out of turn.
    • The teacher got angry at all her chelping.

Forms of chelp

third-person singular presentchelps
present participlechelping
past participlechelped
pastchelped

Origin of chelp

Probably of imitative origin; perhaps from ch(irp) + (y)elp.

Questions about chelp

What does chelp mean?
Chelp means to gossip, particularly in a forthright manner.
What part of speech is chelp?
Chelp is a verb.
What is the past tense of chelp?
The past tense of chelp is chelped.

Words near chelp in the dictionary

  1. chelonochory
  2. chelonology
  3. Chelosauria lovelli
  4. chelotropic
  5. chelow
  6. chelp
  7. chelped
  8. chelping
  9. chelps
  10. Chels
  11. Chelsea

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chelp (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “chelp.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chelp. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.