Word.ws English Dictionary

whipping-boy

whipping-boy is the alternative form of whipping boy.

Meaning of whipping boy

Noun

whipping boy (plural whipping boys)

  1. (historical) A boy who was whipped in the stead of a misbehaving prince in early modern Europe.
    • As the whipping boy, he must take the whippings for the royal heir, Prince Brat.
  2. (transferred sense) Someone punished for the errors of others.
    • Once upon a time there was a little Power, the half-bankrupt wreck of a once great empire, that lost its temper with England, the whipping-boy of all the world, and behaved, as every one knows, most scandalously.1899, Rudyard Kipling, “Judson and the Empire”, in Soldiers Three

Forms of whipping-boy

pluralwhipping-boys

Questions about whipping-boy

What is whipping-boy the alternative form of?
Whipping-boy is the alternative form of whipping boy.

Words near whipping-boy in the dictionary

  1. whipping through
  2. whipping together
  3. whipping top
  4. whipping up
  5. whipping up a storm
  6. whipping-boy
  7. whipping-boys
  8. Whippingham
  9. whippingly
  10. whippings
  11. whippish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whipping-boy (page history and authors); whipping boy (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:

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