Word.ws English Dictionary

gipper

US/ˈɡɪpɚ/

gipper noun: one who gips (cleans fish in preparation for curing).

Noun

gipper (plural gippers)

  1. (obsolete except dialectal) One who gips (cleans fish in preparation for curing).
    • One man takes the Herrings out of the Well with the Ladnet, and fils the Gippers baskets. ¶ 9 Gippers which cut their throats, and takes out the Guts, and fling the ful Herring into one Basket, and the ſhotten Herring into another.1641, Simon Smith, The Herring-Busse Trade […], page 9

Proper noun capitalized: Gipper

the Gipper

  1. A nickname for American actor and politician Ronald Reagan.
    • It took no more than a jaunty one-liner in the second presidential debate—"I refuse to hold my opponent's youth against him"—for large numbers of people to be reassured that if the Gipper had ever been out of it, he was now back.1992, Michael Weiler, W. Barnett Pearce, Reagan and Public Discourse in America, page 137
    • Over the eight years of the Reagan presidency, the Gipper asked Congress for $16.1 billion more in spending than it passed into law.1999, Al Franken, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, page 126

Forms of gipper

pluralgippers

Origin of gipper

From gip (“clean [fish] for curing”) + -er (agent noun suffix).

From Reagan's role as George "the Gipper" Gipp (1895–1920) in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American, which lead to him acquiring the nickname "the Gipper" (from Gipp + -er), later popularized by the media during his presidency.

Words formed from gipper

Phrases with gipper

Questions about gipper

What does gipper mean?
Gipper means one who gips (cleans fish in preparation for curing).
What part of speech is gipper?
Gipper can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce gipper?
Gipper is pronounced /ˈɡɪpɚ/ (US).
What is the plural of gipper?
The plural of gipper is gippers.

Words near gipper in the dictionary

  1. gipe
  2. gipes
  3. Giporlos
  4. gipouns
  5. gipped
  6. gipper
  7. Gipperism
  8. Gipperite
  9. Gipperites
  10. Gippermania
  11. gippers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gipper (page history and authors); Gipper (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “gipper.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gipper. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.