Ripper

How to spell ripper

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ripper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ripper mean?

1. nounA person, tool, or machine that tears or cuts something apart.

Ripper in a sentence

• The builder used a ripper to tear up the old floorboards.

• The software includes a CD ripper for copying audio tracks.

Where does ripper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Ripper is built from the everyday verb 'rip', meaning to tear something apart roughly, with the agent suffix '-er' attached to mean 'one who rips' or 'a thing that rips'. The verb 'rip' itself appeared in English around the 1400s and is thought to come from a Low German or Flemish source related to words meaning to tear or pluck, though its earliest trail is a little uncertain. By the 1800s 'ripper' was a settled noun for both a person who tears and a cutting tool, and it later attached itself grimly to the Whitechapel murderer known as Jack the Ripper. In Australian and British informal speech the word also took a cheerful turn, coming to mean something excellent or first rate, as in 'a ripper of a day'. The spelling trap is simply the doubled 'p', which follows the regular rule that a short stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant when '-er' is added.

How the word is built

• rip (to tear apart)
• -er (agent suffix: one who or that which does the action)