Whisper

How to spell whisper

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce whisper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does whisper mean?

1. verbTo speak very softly using the breath rather than the voice, so as not to be overheard.
2. nounA soft, breathy utterance or sound, barely audible.

Whisper in a sentence

• verb

  She leaned over to whisper the answer during the quiet exam.

• noun

  Her voice dropped to a whisper as the meeting grew tense.

• verb

  The parents had to whisper so they would not wake the sleeping baby.

• noun

  There was not even a whisper of complaint from the audience.

Where does whisper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Whisper comes straight from Old English, where the verb 'hwisprian' meant to speak very softly or to murmur. It belongs to a family of imitative Germanic words built on a root that sounds like the breathy noise it names, sharing ancestry with Old High German 'hwispalon' and Old Norse 'hviskra'. The '-er' ending is a frequentative suffix, signalling a repeated or continuous action, which fits the steady hush of whispering. The spelling kept its original 'wh' from the Old English 'hw', the same cluster you see in 'who' and 'what', and the silent 'h' after the 'w' is the main thing that trips writers up. By the 1500s the noun had also settled into English to name the hushed sound itself.

How the word is built

• whisp- (imitative root: a soft breathy sound)
• -er (frequentative verb suffix)