Scalphunter

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A warrior who collects the scalps of vanquished enemies.
  2. 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."

Example

More examples

"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."

Etymology

From scalp + hunter.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.