zipperhead
zipperhead noun: a soldier in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps or in the Armoured Crewman military trade.
Noun (1)
zipperhead (plural zipperheads)
- A soldier in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps or in the Armoured Crewman military trade.
Noun (2)
zipperhead (plural zipperheads)
- A person of East Asian descent.
- Synonyms:
- almond eyes, chicken lips, dink, gook, slant eye, slopehead, zipperlid
Synonyms of zipperhead
- trooper
- crewman
- tanker
- armoured crewman
- armoured soldier
- tread-head
- treadhead
- almond eyes
- chicken lips
- dink
Forms of zipperhead
| plural | zipperheads |
|---|
Origin of zipperhead
From zipper + head, in reference to the leather helmets used by early Canadian armoured crewmen, which had zipper-like stitching.
Coined by US soldiers during the Vietnam War, apparently from zipper + head. The semantic motivation is unclear. One theory is that the Vietnamese were so called because their heads would split open in zipper-like fashion if they were shot in the right way; another is that zipper-like tracks would be left on them if they were run over by jeeps or tanks.
Questions about zipperhead
- What does zipperhead mean?
- Zipperhead means a soldier in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps or in the Armoured Crewman military trade.
- What part of speech is zipperhead?
- Zipperhead is a noun.
- What is the plural of zipperhead?
- The plural of zipperhead is zipperheads.
Words near zipperhead in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: zipperhead (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-zipperhead.wav.
Cite this entry: “zipperhead.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/zipperhead. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.