Wapper

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A mischievous sprite.

    ""And a wapper, too; when I first saw it I thought it was a rabbit, and now it's bigger than a deer, and still a mile or two off," said Joe."

Verb
  1. 1
    To exhaust; to tire out. dialectal, obsolete, transitive

    "this is it, That makes the wapper'd widow wed again;"

  2. 2
    To move weakly or tremulously; to flag. intransitive

    "But still he stode, his face to set awrye, And wappering turnid vp his white of eye."

Synonyms

All synonyms
gudgeon

Example

More examples

"this is it, That makes the wapper'd widow wed again;"

Etymology

Etymology 1

Frequentative of wap; compare German dialect wappern, wippern (“to move up and down, to rock”).

Etymology 2

Borrowing from Flemish

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.