wapper

wapper verb: to exhaust; to tire out.

Verb

wapper (third-person singular simple present wappers, present participle wappering, simple past and past participle wappered)

(dialectal, obsolete, transitive) To exhaust; to tire out.
- this is it, That makes the wapper'd widow wed again;1623, William Shakespeare, The Life of Tymon of Athens
- Emery Ann declared to me, privately, after I had said in general council that I felt it impossible, that she was "really wappered out with mountains; […]"1876, Adeline Dutton Train Whitney, Sights and Insights: Patience Strong's Story of Over the Way, page 318
(intransitive) To move weakly or tremulously; to flag.
- But still he stode, his face to set awrye, And wappering turnid vp his white of eye.1610, John Higgins, The Mirour for Magistrates
- She was toothlesse, chap-falne, hollow-eyed, and wappering withall, her haire sluttishly hanging about her eares, unkempt, and as greazie as it was knotty;1634, Mateo Alemán, The Rogve: Or, The Life of Gvzman de Alfarache

wapper (plural wappers)

A mischievous sprite.
- "And a wapper, too; when I first saw it I thought it was a rabbit, and now it's bigger than a deer, and still a mile or two off," said Joe.1863, John Beauchamp Jones, Wild Western Scenes, page 40
- The Wapper had, just for the fun of it, put an iron pot under the hat.2022, William Elliot Griffis, Belgian Fairy Tales

لرزنا, پلک جھپکنا

Thou'll not see Stratford to-night, sir; thy horse is wappered out, and that I plainly see."1899, Joseph Arthur Gibbs, A Cotswold Village, page 258:
"I be wappered," Catherine declared as she flung herself down upon the bed and assumed a pose that denoted complete exhaustion.2010, Kathy Lynn Emerson, Face Down upon an Herbal:
When I asked him how he was he confessed to being wappered, which he explained meant tired, fatigued, or, as we might say, knackered.2011, Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, Words We Don't Use (Much Anymore):
Miss Mansfield abandons her salt furrow and in two stanzas lies flapping and wappering.1912 March 28, “Present-Day Criticism”, in The New Age, volume 10, number 22, page 519:

Verb
third-person singular present	wappers
present participle	wappering
past participle	wappered
past	wappered
Noun
plural	wappers

Frequentative of wap; compare German dialect wappern, wippern (“to move up and down, to rock”).

Borrowing from Flemish

What does wapper mean?: Wapper means to exhaust; to tire out.
What is wapper in Urdu?: Wapper in Urdu is لرزنا, پلک جھپکنا. See Wapper meaning in Urdu.
How do you use wapper in a sentence?: Thou'll not see Stratford to-night, sir; thy horse is wappered out, and that I plainly see."
What part of speech is wapper?: Wapper can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of wapper?: The past tense of wapper is wappered.

Adapted from Wiktionary: wapper (page history and authors); wapper (Urdu Wiktionary) (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: 2026-09-02

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