chopper
[chop-er]
- a person or thing that chops.
- a short ax with a large blade, used for cutting up meat, fish, etc.; butcher's cleaver.
- a prehistoric implement made by striking flakes off one or both sides of a stone, considered the oldest known worked stone tool.
- choppers, Slang. the teeth.
- Informal. a helicopter.
- Slang. a motorcycle.
- a device for interrupting an electric current or a beam of light at regular intervals.
Show More
- Informal.
- to travel by helicopter: We choppered into midtown from the airport.
- to travel by motorcycle.
Show More
Origin of chopper
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for choppers
Contemporary Examples
You can hear the choppers descending even if you have never set foot in the country.
By midday, the Ukrainian government had confirmed that two of its choppers had been downed.
“They have choppers looking for them,” Sheriff Herrera says.
The choppers, which had been sold to Syria by Russia in the early 1990s, had been undergoing a refit in Russia.
Now they may lie in wait for choppers on rescue missions, says John Barry.
Historical Examples
He went from that work to the place where the choppers were swinging their axes.
Two ArrowsWilliam O. Stoddard
As the chips flew into the faces of the choppers they fell dead.
Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & ProtectorateCharles M. Skinner
Brigades of choppers were opening roads here and there to deceive.
The ConquestEva Emery Dye
Soon the woods were alive with choppers, and the trees began to fall.
Diary of an Enlisted ManLawrence Van Alstyne
It came out of the choppers, and we just caught the edge of it.
Little BrotherCory Doctorow
chopper
- mainly British a small hand axe
- a butcher's cleaver
- a person or thing that cuts or chops
- an informal name for a helicopter
- mainly British a slang name for penis
- a device for periodically interrupting an electric current or beam of radiation to produce a pulsed current or beamSee also vibrator (def. 2)
- a type of bicycle or motorcycle with very high handlebars and an elongated saddle
- NZ a child's bicycle
- obsolete, slang, mainly US a sub-machine-gun
Show More
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Word Origin and History for choppers
chopper
n.
1550s, "one who chops," agent noun from chop (v.1). Meaning "meat cleaver" is by 1818. Meaning "helicopter" is from 1951, Korean War military slang (cf. egg-beater); as a type of stripped-down motorcycle (originally prefered by Hell's Angels) from 1965.
Show More
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
chopper
[chŏp′ər]
- A crudely flaked, unifacial core tool, especially one associated with the Oldowan stone culture of the early Paleolithic Period.
Show More
The American Heritage® Science Dictionary
Copyright © 2011. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.