zipperhead
A soldier in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps or in the Armoured Crewman military tradeA soldier in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps or in the Armoured Crewman military trade.
Meaning
2 senses(Canada, slang)A soldier in the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps or in the Armoured Crewman military trade.
(US, derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur)A person of East Asian descent.
Origin
From zipper + head, in reference to the leather helmets used by early Canadian armoured crFrom zipper + head, in reference to the leather helmets used by early Canadian armoured crewmen, which had zipper-like stitching.
Coined by US soldiers during the Vietnam War, apparently from zipper + head. The semantic motivation is unclear. One theory is that the Vietnamese were so called because their heads would split open in zipper-like fashion if they were shot in the right way; another is that zipper-like tracks would be left on them if they were run over by jeeps or tanks.
Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Dictionary text adapted from Wiktionary (Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0) and Open English WordNet / Princeton WordNet (CC BY 4.0, WordNet License); shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Example sentences and recordings are credited where they appear.