There is an advertisement on tube trains for something to do with insomnia which makes the point that while we overwhelm and underwhelm, we do not seem to whelm any more.
It is however a word that Cortana knows about and it is a word that OED knows about, seemingly derived from the old English.
I learn that a whelm started life as a half a tree trunk, cut lengthwise and hollowed out, and used to cap the water course at the bottom of a ditch. One could then back-fill that part of the ditch to allow horses and carts passage over.
It then moved from being a noun to being a verb, in which there were all kinds of extensions to the root meaning and amounting to near two columns of close print. So meaning 2b is something to do with turning the wheel of fortune in a downwards direction, with the two recorded uses coming from 1472 and 1532.
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