Word.ws English Dictionary

whirly

whirly adjective: visually suggestive of a swirl, whorl, or vortex.

Adjective

whirly (comparative whirlier, superlative whirliest)

  1. (informal) Visually suggestive of a swirl, whorl, or vortex.
    • The whirly pattern on the wallpaper.
  2. (informal) That moves in a whirling motion.
    • The whirly blades on top of a helicopter.
    • He was studying this brolga dance which was being performed with the accompaniment of a whirly haze of dust sprayed from the rusty wrecks of car bodies strewn over the flats behind them.2013, Alexis Wright, The Swan Book, Constable (2016), page 101

Noun

whirly (plural whirlies)

  1. A snowy whirlwind in the Antarctic.

Forms of whirly

Adjective
comparativewhirlier
superlativewhirliest
Noun
pluralwhirlies

Origin of whirly

From whirl + -y.

Words formed from whirly

Phrases with whirly

Questions about whirly

What does whirly mean?
Whirly means visually suggestive of a swirl, whorl, or vortex.
What part of speech is whirly?
Whirly can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near whirly in the dictionary

  1. whirlwigs
  2. whirlwind
  3. whirlwindish
  4. whirlwinds
  5. whirlwindy
  6. whirly
  7. whirly tube
  8. whirly tubes
  9. whirly-bone
  10. whirly-wind
  11. whirly-winds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whirly (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Werley.wav.

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