Word.ws English Dictionary

whipping boys

whipping boys is the plural 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

Questions about whipping boys

What is whipping boys the plural of?
Whipping boys is the plural of whipping boy.

Words near whipping boys in the dictionary

  1. whippily
  2. whippin'
  3. whippiness
  4. whipping
  5. whipping boy
  6. whipping boys
  7. whipping cream
  8. whipping creams
  9. whipping down
  10. whipping frog
  11. whipping frogs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whipping boys (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.

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