Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A military engineer who specializes in sapping and other field fortification activities.
- noun A military engineer who lays, detects, and disarms mines.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A chisel used in some sawing-machines to cut away waste or sap-wood and reduce a log to a cylindrical shape.
- noun Any insect which sucks the sap of plants, as the rice-sapper.
- noun One who saps; specifically, a soldier employed in the building of fortifications, the execution of field-works, and the performance of similar operations.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun One who saps; specifically (Mil.), one who is employed in working at saps, building and repairing fortifications, and the like.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun One who saps; specifically, one who is employed in working at saps, building and repairing fortifications, and the like. Often known as a combat engineer or military engineer.
- noun UK, colloquial an officer or private of the Royal Engineers.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a military engineer who lays or detects and disarms mines
- noun a military engineer who does sapping (digging trenches or undermining fortifications)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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While with this unit, Source received training in sapper techniques.
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There was a psychological moment as the crouching man came up into the trench with his rifle and bayonet, when his chin was in the perfect position: moreover, the sapper was a full back of merit.
No Man's Land 1912
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TOM BOWMAN: Specialist Jenkins was a sapper, a combat engineer.
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The president of Francisco Marroquin University drove me and a half dozen other American reporters to his campus in an armored vehicle preceded by a sapper squad, checking for potential land mines in its path.
Murray Fromson: A Footnote to History Murray Fromson 2011
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The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
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TOM BOWMAN: Specialist Jenkins was a sapper, a combat engineer.
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The president of Francisco Marroquin University drove me and a half dozen other American reporters to his campus in an armored vehicle preceded by a sapper squad, checking for potential land mines in its path.
Murray Fromson: A Footnote to History Murray Fromson 2011
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One of my uncles was actually a sapper who cleared land mines for Anzacs, Australian soldiers, and we had to flee Vietnam.
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The tome ended his England career because he criticised the then manager, Clive Woodward, and was deemed an energy sapper; he once admitted that he had a personality trait where he could go from being relatively calm to relatively insane quite quickly, describing his behaviour as sometimes less than ideal.
Richard Cockerill ready to make Leicester Tigers roar against Saracens 2011
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One of my uncles was actually a sapper who cleared land mines for Anzacs, Australian soldiers, and we had to flee Vietnam.
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