Word.ws English Dictionary

whump

/ʍʌmp/

whump noun: a soft thumping sound.

Noun

whump (countable and uncountable, plural whumps)

  1. (countable, informal) A soft thumping sound.
  2. (slang, uncountable) A genre of fan fiction in which a character endures injury, torture, or other forms of physical and mental suffering.
    • By embracing dark genres of slash such as ‘squick’ and ‘whump’, the art of mythagowood purposely skirts parameters of taste and acceptability.2014, Joseph Brennan, “'Fandom is full of pearl clutching old ladies': Nonnies in the online slash closet”, in International Journal of Cultural Studies, volume 17, number 4, page 365
    • Narrative devices shared by Hannibal and fanfiction include “whump,” the vivid abuse and torture of a character, a popular convention across certain types of fanfiction: Graham is knocked out, shot, stabbed, gutted, sawed open, and subjected to induced seizures.2018, Naja Later, “Quality Television (TV) Eats Itself: The TV-Auteur and the Promoted Fanboy”, in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, volume 35, number 6, page 540

Verb

whump (third-person singular simple present whumps, present participle whumping, simple past and past participle whumped)

  1. (informal, transitive) To strike something with a whump.
  2. To make a soft thumping sound.
    • […] the sound of sheets drying on a line a windy day: whumping, whushing.1963, Eugene Keenan Garber, M'Ginnis, page 261

Forms of whump

Noun
pluralwhumps
Verb
third-person singular presentwhumps
present participlewhumping
past participlewhumped
pastwhumped

Origin of whump

Imitative.

Words that rhyme with whump

18 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about whump

What does whump mean?
Whump means a soft thumping sound.
What part of speech is whump?
Whump can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce whump?
Whump is pronounced /ʍʌmp/.
What is the plural of whump?
The plural of whump is whumps.

Words near whump in the dictionary

  1. whummels
  2. whummle
  3. whummled
  4. whummles
  5. whummling
  6. whump
  7. whumpage
  8. whumped
  9. whumpf
  10. whumpfed
  11. whumpfing

Source and license

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