Word.ws English Dictionary

whelps

whelps is the plural of whelp.

whelps is the third-person singular simple present indicative of whelp.

Meaning of whelp

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
  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.
  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).

See all 6 meanings of whelp

Phrases with whelps

Questions about whelps

What is whelps the plural of?
Whelps is the plural of whelp.

Words near whelps in the dictionary

  1. whelpless
  2. Whelpley
  3. Whelpleys
  4. whelpling
  5. whelplings
  6. whelps
  7. whelpy
  8. Whelton
  9. Wheltons
  10. whemmel
  11. whemmeled

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whelps (page history and authors); 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.

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