Word.ws English Dictionary

whippoorwills

whippoorwills is the plural 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.

Questions about whippoorwills

What is whippoorwills the plural of?
Whippoorwills is the plural of whippoorwill.

Words near whippoorwills in the dictionary

  1. whippomorph
  2. whippomorphan
  3. whippomorphans
  4. whippomorphs
  5. whippoorwill
  6. whippoorwills
  7. whippos
  8. whippowill
  9. whippowills
  10. Whipps
  11. Whippses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whippoorwills (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: “whippoorwills.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whippoorwills. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.