Clipper

How to spell clipper

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce clipper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does clipper mean?

1. nounA tool used for trimming or cutting something short, such as hair, nails, or hedges.
2. nounA fast nineteenth-century sailing ship with a narrow hull and large sails, built for speed.

Clipper in a sentence

• The barber reached for an electric clipper to tidy the back of my neck.

• The tea trade once depended on each clipper racing home from China.

• She keeps a small nail clipper in the bathroom drawer.

• A restored clipper now sits in dry dock as a maritime museum.

Where does clipper come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Clipper is built from the verb 'clip', which English took from the Old Norse 'klippa', meaning 'to cut or shear', a word Norse settlers carried into northern England during the Viking age. Adding the suffix '-er', which marks a person or thing that does an action, gives the literal sense of 'something that clips'. By the seventeenth century 'clip' had also picked up the idea of moving at a brisk, cutting pace, as in 'going at a fast clip', and that lively sense produced the nineteenth-century 'clipper ship', a sleek vessel famed for slicing swiftly through the water. The same root still survives in everyday cutting tools such as nail clippers and hedge clippers. The simple spelling, with its single 'l' but doubled 'p' before '-er', is the only mild trap, since the short vowel keeps the consonant doubled.

How the word is built

• clip (to cut or shorten)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix)