Word.ws English Dictionary

whelp

/wɛlp/

whelp noun: a young offspring of a various carnivores (canid, ursid, felid, pinniped), especially of a dog or a wolf, the young of a bear or similar mammal (lion, tiger, seal); a pup, wolf cub. Also the alternative form of welp.

Noun

whelp (plural whelps)

  1. A young offspring of a various carnivores (canid, ursid, felid, pinniped), especially of a dog or a wolf, the young of a bear or similar mammal (lion, tiger, seal); a pup, wolf cub.
    • […]And fared like a furious wyld Beare, / Whose whelpes are ſtolne away, ſhe being otherwhere.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto XI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • Pro. […]Then was this Iſland / (Saue for the Son, that he^([sic]) did littour heere, / A frekelld whelpe, hag-borne) not honour'd with / A humane ſhape.1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published...
  2. (derogatory) An insolent youth; a mere child.
    • July 13, 1713, Joseph Addison, The Guardian
      That awkward whelp with his money bags would have made his entrance.
    • October 22, 2011, Princess Luna, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, "Luna Eclipsed"
      Thy backside is whole and ungobbled, thou ungrateful whelp!
  3. (obsolete) A kind of ship.
  4. One of several wooden strips to prevent wear on a windlass on a clipper-era ship.
  5. A tooth on a sprocket wheel (compare sprocket and cog).

Verb

whelp (third-person singular simple present whelps, present participle whelping, simple past and past participle whelped)

  1. (ambitransitive, usually, she-wolf) To give birth.
    • The bitch whelped.
    • The she-wolf whelped a large litter of cubs.

Also used as

whelp is also the alternative form of welp.

Forms of whelp

Noun
pluralwhelps
Verb
third-person singular presentwhelps
present participlewhelping
past participlewhelped
pastwhelped

Origin of whelp

From Middle English whelp, from Old English hwelp, from Proto-West Germanic *hwelp, from Proto-Germanic *hwelpaz (compare Dutch welp, German Welpe, Welfe, Old Norse hvelpr, Norwegian Nynorsk kvelp, Danish hvalp), from pre-Germanic *kʷelbos, of uncertain origin.

From Middle English whelpen, from Old English hwelpian, derived from hwelp.

Variant of welp.

Words formed from whelp

Words that rhyme with whelp

Questions about whelp

What does whelp mean?
Whelp means a young offspring of a various carnivores (canid, ursid, felid, pinniped), especially of a dog or a wolf, the young of a bear or similar mammal (lion, tiger, seal); a pup, wolf cub.
What part of speech is whelp?
Whelp can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce whelp?
Whelp is pronounced /wɛlp/.
What is the plural of whelp?
The plural of whelp is whelps.

Words near whelp in the dictionary

  1. whelm
  2. whelmed
  3. whelming
  4. whelmings
  5. whelms
  6. whelp
  7. whelpday
  8. whelpdays
  9. whelped
  10. whelpeth
  11. whelphood

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whelp (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)-Vealhurl-whelp.wav.

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