wimp [1920s] Wimp seems to have originated in the USA in the 1920s, although it was not really used much until the 1960s. There was an earlier slang term wimp which meant ‘woman’, used at Oxford University in the early years of the 20th century: this could be the origin, or wimp could simply be an alteration of whimper. Like bonk, drum, and hoot, whimper [E16th] is another of those words suggested by the sound it represents. ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper ‘is from The Hollow Men (1925) by T. S. Eliot. For WIMP see acronyms.