whalebone
whalebone noun: the horny material from the fringed plates of the upper jaw of baleen whales that is used to filter plankton; once used as stays in corsets.
Noun
whalebone (countable and uncountable, plural whalebones)
- The horny material from the fringed plates of the upper jaw of baleen whales that is used to filter plankton; once used as stays in corsets
- “You have probably never seen anything like this before, Mr. Toler. It is baleen, or if you prefer it, whalebone, taken from the mouth of the bowhead whale. It is used by the whale to filter its food.”1954, Alexander Alderson, chapter 5, in The Subtle Minotaur
- Synonyms:
- baleen
Synonyms of whalebone
Forms of whalebone
| plural | whalebones |
|---|
Origin of whalebone
From whale + bone.
Words formed from whalebone
Phrases with whalebone
Questions about whalebone
- What does whalebone mean?
- Whalebone means the horny material from the fringed plates of the upper jaw of baleen whales that is used to filter plankton; once used as stays in corsets.
- What part of speech is whalebone?
- Whalebone is a noun.
- What is the plural of whalebone?
- The plural of whalebone is whalebones.
Words near whalebone in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whalebone (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-whalebone.wav.
Cite this entry: “whalebone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whalebone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.