right whale
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.98 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
1
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any baleen whale of the genus Eubalaena.
Example Sentences
- "It is said (in what may be an apocryphal story) that around 1712, a Nantucket captain named Christopher Hussey was blown offshore while hunting right whales, and came upon a school of large, bluff-headed whales with forward-angled spouts."
- "The previous night, they’d received a call from the federal Department of Oceans and Fisheries (DFO): a right whale was tangled up in crab trap lines near their location."
Etymology
From right + whale, but the sense of right in the name is unknown. sense of right The commonly given etymology based on these whales being for various reasons the "right" whales to hunt (e.g. easy to hunt and docile) is questionable but highly plausible and therefore not necessarily a folk etymology, as Eric Jay Dolin writes in 2007 in his history of American whaling: The earliest references to the right whale offer no indication why it was called that, and some who have studied the issue point out that the word "right" in this context might just as likely be intended "to connote 'true' or 'proper,' meaning typical of the group." The scientific name of the whale's genus is Eubalaena, which means "good or true whales".