Why We Say ‘Welp’ Instead of ‘Well’

We say it all the time, even if we don’t try to...we just do, no argument. Simple as that: “Welp, that’s that!”
“Welp, I tried!”
“Welp, guess I better get going.”

Why do we say ‘welp’?
Actually, we don’t!
We say “well” and then close our lips tight, but we don’t pop the “p”. Try it and see what I mean.

We know this odd utterance as “welp” because that’s how we write it down. At the end of a letter or chat message, “welp, guess I’ll sign off now”, “welp, catch ya later”, etc. But we never actually pronounce it as ‘welP’.....there's no emphasis on the “P”.

Dictionary.com describes the word “welp” as an informal variant of ‘well’ used to indicate disappointment, resignation, or acceptance at the beginning of an utterance (as in) “Welp, this might not work out for us after all.”

When did "welp" enter our language?

The term ‘welp’ was first noted somewhere between 1945-1950, as “an excrescent P representing closing of the lips, creating an unreleased labial stop” (Dictionary.com).

To try and understand this better, we can put it in context with the words ‘yeah’ and ‘no’. We have turned ‘yeah’ to “yep” and ‘no’ to “nope” and we’ve done the same thing with ‘well’ by adding the extra “P”. The thing is, on ‘nope’ and ‘yep’ we pronounce the ‘p’ but not on ‘welp’, although that’s how we spell out the word.

Welp.....it makes sense to me.

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