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''cooper'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''cooper'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260904120411-00-⌔

cooper - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

cooper (countable and uncountable, plural coopers)

  • A craftsman who makes and repairs barrels and similar wooden vessels such as casks, buckets and tubs.
    • ✤ Hypernym: barrelmaker
    • ✤ They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.1
  • (obsolete) A drink of half stout and half porter.

Verb

cooper (third-person singular simple present coopers, present participle coopering, simple past and past participle coopered)

  • (now rare) To make and repair barrels etc.
  • (transitive, slang, obsolete) To forge or imitate (writing).
    • ✤ […] though, owing to his forged signatures having been too often detected, he was declared to be “a duffer at coopering a monekur.”2
  • (transitive, slang, obsolete) To intentionally injure (a racehorse) to spoil its chances of winning.
    • ✤ Every design that villainy could suggest was had recourse to in the hopes of nobbling Wild Dayrell; but never being left for an hour by either his trainer or jockey, he escaped the intended ‘coopering’, even when the lynchpins of the wheels of his van had been tampered with.3

Noun

cooper (plural coopers)

  • Alternative form of coper (“floating grog shop”).

Verb

cooper (third-person singular simple present coopers, present participle coopering, simple past and past participle coopered)

  • Alternative form of coper (“operate as floating grog shop”).

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˈkuːpə(ɹ)/
    • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
    • Rhymes: -uːpə(ɹ)
    • Hyphenation: coop‧er
  • IPA: /ˈkʊpɚ/4 (US dialectal)

Etymology 1

From coop + -er.

Etymology 2

Printed 2026-09-04.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 5, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1872, Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold, page 269: ↩

  3. 1864, Baily’s Magazine of Sports & Pastimes, volume 8, page 110: ↩

  4. McDavid, Raven Ioor Jr. (1953), “13. Some Social Differences in Pronunciation”, in William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., editor, Dialects in culture: essays in general dialectology ‎, University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, published 1979, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 116. ↩

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Secondary

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