Also 6 whealme, 6–7 whelme. [f. WHELM v.]
1. A wooden drain-pipe: orig. a tree-trunk halved vertically, hollowed, and ‘whelmed down’ or turned with the concavity downwards to form an arched watercourse. Now dial.
c. 1576. in Catal. Archives All Souls’ Coll. (1877), 37. Quidam truncus vocatus a whelme.
1584. Crt.-roll Wormingford, Essex (MS.). Cursus aquae vocat. The whealme est in decasu. Ibid. (1613). [To place] sufficientem truncam (Anglicè a whelme) in regia via.
1797. A. Young, Agric. Suffolk, 157. I strongly recommend these carrier ditches to be open, though at the expence of a whelm at the bottom of a field where a cart-way is necessary.
1823. E. Moor, Suffolk Words, 478.
2. The overwhelming surge of waters. poet.
1842. Blackw. Mag., LII. 287. Dark yawn’d a cleft in the midst of the whelm.
1888. Swinburne, Armada, VI. iii. Poems 1904, III. 203. They sink in the whelm of the waters.
