Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (US) a sound, comprehensive beating or defeat.

1822		R. Bailey Life & Adventures 174: Why sir, said I, I have a notion to give you a damn’d whipping in the street: will you, said he, you damn’d rascal, squaring himself. [...] I seized him and beat him excessively before any person could interfere.
1843		S. Wyman Life and Adventures of Seth Wyman 95: [H]is pride having received such a shock from his whipping, and from his being obliged to knock under.
1864		G. Hand diary 26 Jan. pub. as Civil War in Apacheland (1996) 154: The whipping had a good effect on him as it tended to silence his big mouth considerable.
1887		G. Devol Forty Years a Gambler 87: He claimed it was his first whipping, but he could stand the old head; it was too hard for him.
1910		Bulletin (Sydney) 27 Oct. 10/4: A battered lady, with one eye in a bundle, her ear threaded on, and an arm in a sling, described the ‘whipping’ she had received.
1945		C. Himes If He Hollers 127: ‘The worst whipping I ever got come from me thinking I could whip every gray boy I seen’.
1972		D. Jenkins Semi-Tough 279: As happy as I am to be on the winning side in the Super Bowl, I can’t brag that thirty-one to twenty-eight is much of a whipping.
1993		K. Scott Monster (1994) 210: Stag put an old-style gangster whipping on him.

2. punishment, physical discipline.

1901		Boy’s Own Paper 23 Mar. 391: Yours were the deserts and the Mad Sahib’s got the whipping for them – that’s nothing new.
1968		J. Colebrook Cross of Lassitude 299: You don’t have to take that whippin’ shit from no one.