Word.ws English Dictionary

whip-poor-will

whip-poor-will is the alternative form of whippoorwill.

Meaning of whippoorwill

Noun

whippoorwill (plural whippoorwills)

  1. A nocturnal insectivorous bird of North America (Antrostomus vociferus, syn. Caprimulgus vociferus), a type of nightjar, named after its characteristic call.
    • “Seems like I heard a whippoorwill callinʼ, and I thought to myself, Go on away from here, weʼll whip ole Will when we find him.”1952, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Penguin Books (2014), page 55
  2. The distinctive call of the above bird.
    • The bird sang his whippoorwills all night.

Forms of whip-poor-will

pluralwhip-poor-wills

Questions about whip-poor-will

What is whip-poor-will the alternative form of?
Whip-poor-will is the alternative form of whippoorwill.

Words near whip-poor-will in the dictionary

  1. whip-jacks
  2. whip-o'-will
  3. whip-o'-wills
  4. whip-o-will
  5. whip-o-wills
  6. whip-poor-will
  7. whip-poor-wills
  8. whip-round
  9. whip-rounds
  10. whip-smart
  11. whip-tailed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whip-poor-will (page history and authors); whippoorwill (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: “whip-poor-will.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whip-poor-will. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.