Gipper
name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 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."
- 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."
Example
More examples"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."
Etymology
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.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.