The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) has a frequency-adaptive time-frequency tiling property, which makes it popular for the analysis of dispersive elastic wave signals. However, because the time-frequency tiling of CWT is not signal-dependent, it still has some limitations in the analysis of elastic waves with spectral components that are dispersed rapidly in time. The objective of this paper is to introduce an advanced time-frequency analysis method, called the dispersion-based continuous wavelet transform (D-CWT) whose time-frequency tiling is adaptively varied according to the dispersion relation of the waves to be analyzed. In the D-CWT method, time-frequency tiling can have frequency-adaptive characteristics like CWT and adaptively rotate in the time-frequency plane depending on the local wave dispersion. Therefore, D-CWT provides higher time-frequency localization than the conventional CWT. In this work, D-CWT method is applied to the analysis of dispersive elastic waves measured in waveguide experiments and an efficient procedure to extract information on the dispersion relation hidden in a wave signal is presented. In addition, the ridge property of the present transform is investigated theoretically to show its effectiveness in analyzing highly time-varying signals. Numerical simulations and experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the present method.