Skipper

How to spell skipper

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce skipper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does skipper mean?

1. nounThe captain of a boat or ship, or the leader of a small team.
2. verbTo act as the captain or leader of a boat or team.

Skipper in a sentence

• noun

  The skipper steered the trawler safely back into the harbour.

• verb

  He was asked to skipper the charter boat for the summer season.

• noun

  As skipper of the cricket side, she set the field and made every key decision.

• verb

  She will skipper the national team in next month's tournament.

Where does skipper come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The word came into English in the late 1300s from Middle Dutch and Middle Low German 'schipper', meaning the master of a ship; that noun was built straightforwardly on 'schip', the ordinary Dutch word for 'ship', with the agent ending '-er' marking the person in charge of it. English absorbed it during the busy centuries of North Sea trade, when Dutch and Low German sailors and merchants were constant fixtures in English ports, and the spelling settled with the doubled 'p' that reflects the short, clipped vowel. The same Germanic root gives us the native English 'ship' itself, so a skipper is literally a 'shipper' in the older sense of one who runs a ship. Over time the meaning widened from sea captain to the leader of any small team or boat crew, and a casual verb sense, to skipper a vessel or a side, grew out of the noun. The double 'p' is the spelling point worth fixing in memory: it mirrors the crisp short vowel just as in 'slipper' and 'flipper'.

How the word is built

• skip- (from Dutch schip: ship)
• -per (agent suffix: one who handles)