whale
/ˈweɪl/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.98 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Near-synonym: baleen (obsolete sense)"
- "And God created great whales, and euery liuing creature that moueth, which the waters brought forth aboundantly after their kinde, and euery winged foule after his kinde: and God saw that it was good."
- "Whale oil was still moderately useful for several things, and whale lives were valueless. Dead whales were used to soften leather and lubricate machines and to somewhat mitigate the effects of trench foot in the first world war."
- "The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, extracting it in earnest began only in 1859 after an oil strike in Pennsylvania.[…]It was used to make kerosene, the main fuel for artificial lighting after overfishing led to a shortage of whale blubber."
- "It was a whale of a job. […] It took two months, and the fair blush of youth off my cheeks."
- "But when it comes to his business life and business career, Will Clayton is not as other men; he is such a whale of a lot better that it suggests a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(s)kʷálos Proto-Germanic *hwalaz Proto-West Germanic *hwal Old English hwæl Middle English whal English whale From Middle English whal, whale, from Old English hwæl (“whale”), from Proto-West Germanic *hwal, from Proto-Germanic *hwalaz (“whale”) (compare German Wal, Swedish val, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål hval, Norwegian Nynorsk kval; compare also Dutch walvis, West Frisian walfisk, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kʷálos (“sheatfish”) (compare German Wels, Latin squalus (“big sea fish”), Old Prussian kalis, Ancient Greek ἄσπαλος (áspalos), Avestan 𐬐𐬀𐬭𐬀 (kara, “kind of fish”)).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈweɪl/
- British English: /ˈweɪl/