Word.ws English Dictionary

fail whale

fail whale noun: an image of a whale that formerly accompanied certain error messages on the Twitter microblogging website.

Noun

fail whale (plural fail whales)

  1. (Internet) An image of a whale that formerly accompanied certain error messages on the Twitter microblogging website.

Forms of fail whale

pluralfail whales

Origin of fail whale

The fail whale originated on Twitter; the term was coined by web designer Jen Simmons in 2007 in a tweet.

Questions about fail whale

What does fail whale mean?
Fail whale means an image of a whale that formerly accompanied certain error messages on the Twitter microblogging website.
What part of speech is fail whale?
Fail whale is a noun.
What is the plural of fail whale?
The plural of fail whale is fail whales.

Words near fail whale in the dictionary

  1. fail safe
  2. fail up
  3. fail up the ladder
  4. fail upward
  5. fail upwards
  6. fail whale
  7. fail whales
  8. fail'd
  9. fail-deadly
  10. fail-safe
  11. fail-safed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fail whale (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-fail whale.wav.

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