Word.ws English Dictionary

whipstaff

UK/ˈʍɪpstɑːf/

whipstaff noun: a bar, going through the poopdeck, attached perpendicularly to the tiller for steering a ship.

whipstaff: a bar, going through the poopdeck, attached perpendicularly to the tiller for steering a ship
Image: KDS444, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

whipstaff (plural whipstaffs or whipstaves)

  1. A bar, going through the poopdeck, attached perpendicularly to the tiller for steering a ship.

Forms of whipstaff

pluralwhipstaffs
pluralwhipstaves

Origin of whipstaff

From whip + staff.

Questions about whipstaff

What does whipstaff mean?
Whipstaff means a bar, going through the poopdeck, attached perpendicularly to the tiller for steering a ship.
What part of speech is whipstaff?
Whipstaff is a noun.
How do you pronounce whipstaff?
Whipstaff is pronounced /ˈʍɪpstɑːf/ (UK).
What is the plural of whipstaff?
The plural of whipstaff is whipstaffs.

Words near whipstaff in the dictionary

  1. whipsnakes
  2. whipsocket
  3. whipsockets
  4. whipspider
  5. whipspiders
  6. whipstaff
  7. whipstaffs
  8. whipstalk
  9. whipstalks
  10. whipstall
  11. whipstalled

Source and license

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