Other forms: whispers, whispered, whispering
To whisper is to speak with breath instead of voice, so quietly that only the person beside you can hear. You whisper in a library, behind your hand in the back row, over a baby who has just gone to sleep.
It is a noun as well — his voice dropped to a whisper — and it stretches beyond people: wind whispers in dry grass, silk whispers when it moves. There are whispers that the factory will close means the rumour is going round quietly, and a whisper of something is barely any of it at all, a whisper of perfume in a cold room. You whisper something to someone, never at them, and a whisper carries further than people expect: say it in the wrong corridor and the whole office has it by lunchtime.
1verbwhisperTo speak very quietly, using breath rather than the voice, close to someone.~51%
“She leaned over and whispered the answer to the boy beside her.”
2nounsoundSpeech made this way, or the soft sound of it.~45%
“He was so tired that his voice came out as a whisper.”
3nounrumourA rumour passed quietly from person to person.~2%
“There were whispers that the two of them had already resigned.”
4verbwindOf wind, leaves or cloth — to make a soft rushing sound.~2%
“The wind whispered through the long grass all afternoon.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 64 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense (47 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English hwisprian, and behind it a Germanic word for hissing and whistling — the ancient root *ḱweys- means to hiss, whistle, whisper, all three at once. Whisper and whistle are the same noise, heard two different ways.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱweys-
Proto-Germanic
*hwisprōną — to hiss, whistle, whisper
Proto-West Germanic
*hwisprōn
Old English
hwisprian — to mutter, murmur, whisper
Middle English
whisperen
English, today
whisper
Built from
From Middle English whisperen, from Old English hwisprian (“to mutter, murmur, whisper”), from Proto-West Germanic hwisprōn, from Proto-Germanic hwisprōną (“to hiss, whistle, whisper”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱweys-, ḱwey- (“to hiss, whistle, whisper”). Cognate with Dutch wisperen (“to whisper”), German wispern (“to mumble, whisper”). Related also to Danish hviske (“to whisper”), Icelandic hvískra (“to whisper”), Norwegian Bokmål hviske, kviskre (“to whisper”), Norwegian Nynorsk kviskre, kviskra (“to whisper”), Swedish viska (“to whisper”). More at English whistle.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA