Word.ws English Dictionary

scalphunter

scalphunter noun: a warrior who collects the scalps of vanquished enemies.

Noun

scalphunter (plural scalphunters)

  1. A warrior who collects the scalps of vanquished enemies.
  2. An agent who vets potential defectors.
    • There is one class of spook we have not encountered as yet. This is the scalp-hunter, or defector-hunter. Quite often a scalp-hunter will be more valuable than almost any other intelligence operator.1982, Richard Deacon, With My Little Eye: The Memoirs of a Spy-Hunter, page 103
    • But agency policy is that the case officer is, in the jargon, a "scalp hunter" who must turn a contact into an agent […]2002, Angelo Codevilla, Informing Statecraft, page 82

Forms of scalphunter

pluralscalphunters

Origin of scalphunter

From scalp + hunter.

Questions about scalphunter

What does scalphunter mean?
Scalphunter means a warrior who collects the scalps of vanquished enemies.
What part of speech is scalphunter?
Scalphunter is a noun.
What is the plural of scalphunter?
The plural of scalphunter is scalphunters.

Words near scalphunter in the dictionary

  1. scalpellus
  2. scalpels
  3. scalper
  4. scalpers
  5. scalpes
  6. scalphunter
  7. scalphunters
  8. scalphunting
  9. scalpin
  10. scalping
  11. scalping knife

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scalphunter (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: “scalphunter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scalphunter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.