Word.ws English Dictionary

right whale

right whale noun: any baleen whale of the genus Eubalaena.

right whale: any baleen whale of the genus Eubalaena
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

right whale (plural right whales)

  1. Any baleen whale of the genus Eubalaena.
    • It is said (in what may be an apocryphal story) that around 1712, a Nantucket captain named Christopher Hussey was blown offshore while hunting right whales, and came upon a school of large, bluff-headed whales with forward-angled spouts.1996, Richard Ellis, Deep Atlantic: Life, Death, and Exploration in the Abyss, page 305
    • The previous night, they’d received a call from the federal Department of Oceans and Fisheries (DFO): a right whale was tangled up in crab trap lines near their location.2018 June 20, Chelsea Murray, The Guardian

Forms of right whale

pluralright whales

Origin of right whale

From right + whale, but the sense of right in the name is unknown. sense of right The commonly given etymology based on these whales being for various reasons the "right" whales to hunt (e.g. easy to hunt and docile) is questionable but highly plausible and therefore not necessarily a folk etymology, as Eric Jay Dolin writes in 2007 in his history of American whaling: The earliest references to the right whale offer no indication why it was called that, and some who have studied the issue point out that the word "right" in this context might just as likely be intended "to connote 'true' or 'proper,' meaning typical of the group." The scientific name of the whale's genus is Eubalaena, which means "good or true whales".

Words formed from right whale

Questions about right whale

What does right whale mean?
Right whale means any baleen whale of the genus Eubalaena.
What part of speech is right whale?
Right whale is a noun.
What is the plural of right whale?
The plural of right whale is right whales.

Words near right whale in the dictionary

  1. right trapezoid
  2. right trapezoids
  3. right triangle
  4. right triangles
  5. right up someone's alley
  6. right whale
  7. right whale dolphin
  8. right whale dolphins
  9. right whales
  10. right wing
  11. right wings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: right 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:

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