[f. CHOP v.1 + -ER1.]
1. One who chops or cuts into pieces.
1552. Huloet, Chopper, truncator.
1597. Shaks., 2 Hen. IV., II. iv. 342. Call me Pantler, and Bread-chopper.
1694. Acc. Sev. Late Voy., II. vii. (1711), 173. One of them cuts the soft and tough Fat into small pieces with a long Knife; this Man they call the Chopper.
1883. E. Ingersoll, in Harper’s Mag., Jan., 199. Thoreau once speaks of hearing ‘the rare, domestic sound’ of the wood-chopper’s axe.
b. U.S. Lumber-trade. A workman who fells and lops the trees.
1827. J. F. Cooper, Prairie, vii. 103. What will the Yankee Choppers say?
1847. Emerson, Poems (1857), 204. Fishers and choppers and ploughmen Shall constitute a state.
1880. Lumberman’s Gaz., Jan., 28. A Wisconsin lumber-camp is divided into ‘choppers,’ ‘sawyers,’ and ‘swampers.’
c. slang. (See quot.)
1865. in Pall Mall Gaz., 4 Sept., 9/2. I was glad to get it [meat] off to a ‘chopper’ at last…. Dr. Letheby explained that a ‘chopper’ is the trade term for a sausage-maker.
2. An instrument used for cleaving or cutting up: spec. a large-bladed short-handled axe used for cutting up meat, wood, etc.; a butcher’s cleaver.
1818. Todd, Chopper, a butcher’s cleaver; a word now used more frequently than cleaver.
1844. Macaulay, Barére (Misc. Wks. 1860, II. 160). The long fair hair of handsome aristocrats who had died by the national chopper [the guillotine].
1884. Daily News, 16 Aug., 7/1. Charged with the wilful murder of his son … by striking him on the head with a chopper.
3. An agricultural implement for thinning out plants in drills. Used in Great Britain for turnips; in the United States for cotton plants. (Knight, Mech. Dict., 1874.)
