![]() I must be the odd one out, since I use it all the time. It makes sense that comics, a form that is very dialogue-centric yet can only rely on typography and approximated facial expressions to convey intonation, would put every trick they can find to use to make the speech bubble come alive.Īnd indeed "welp" has this very "auditory" quality to it, immediately suggestive of prosody and even facial muscle information I guess? I don't think I've ever used it myself, because to me it's still tinged with the confusion I felt on first encoutering it, plus I kinda think it's ugly as a grapheme. I read rather a lot of webcomics, and "welp" feels completely familiar by this point. My favorite example in English is still "sup" yes siree We've collected evidence for it from books, from newspapers, and from blogs, which means that this word might be a good candidate for entry.Īfter thinking about "welp" for awhile, other similar words came to mind: yep, yup, nope, sup - all of them ending with a voiceless bilabial stop, "an unreleased (simulating the sudden closure of the lips at the end of the utterance)". Where it does turn up, and in force, is in informal writing: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets.īut we're seeing it spread. Welp doesn't even turn up in places where you'd expect to see transcription of "dialectal" or more informal speech. It turns out that when most people throughout the 20th century heard a welp, they rendered it as well-perhaps because it sounds like a dialect pronunciation to most people (though it's not). ![]() One linguist went so far as to say that anyone who didn't know what welp meant was probably an alien.īut if we have written evidence of welp that's 70 years old, then why is this a word we're watching and not a word we're defining? Welp. Well gained that final -p as part of a normal process of articular: the lips come together to stop the sound of well and prepare for the next sound, and some hear that stoppage as a -p. It shows up in a scholarly article on two of welp's linguistic cousins: yep and nope. Though we have presented quite a bit of informal and recent use, our earliest written use of welp goes back over 70 years. But welp has a sense of resignation and finality that well often doesn't have: Welp is a synonym of the interjection well, which is used to express surprise or signal the beginning of a comment or discussion ("Well, what have we here?" "Well, you're never going to believe this, but…"). We regret to inform Twitter that welp is a word, even if it's not in the dictionary. And yet:ĭoug Lambert Tweet: "Welp" is not a word…. Social media is a place where informal language flourishes, which means that lexicographers get to chronicle the exploits of words that don't have much written use in edited prose-words like welp.Ĭhicago Tribune Tweet: Welp, here comes the 1st accumulating snowfall of this winter…. ![]() Update: This word was added in March 2018. " Yes, 'Welp' Is a Real Word: 'Welp' is over 70 years old" Still, I was curious, so I looked around a bit, and found this entry in Merriam-Webster: Or, I thought, perhaps it's a typo for "well". ![]() I had no idea what he meant by the first syllable. This morning, someone sent me a message that began, "Welp, at least word boundaries are respected…". ![]()
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