fighter
Pluralfighters
- 1A person who fights, or who takes part in combat of any kind.
The fighter who threw the first punch was arrested outside the stadium.
Security guards pulled the two fighters apart before anyone was seriously hurt.
Note
The word is an old native formation, Old English feohtere, made from fight and the agent ending -er. The same pattern still builds compounds that name what is fought for or against: freedom fighter, crime fighter, and firefighter, which stands behind the casual name for a firefighter.
- 2A fixed-wing military aircraft designed mainly to shoot down other aircraft, sometimes also used to attack targets on the ground.
The air force scrambled two fighters to intercept the unidentified aircraft.
The new fighter can also carry bombs for attacks on ground targets.
- 3A person who takes part in boxing or in any of the martial arts.
The judges scored the bout for the younger fighter.
Mixed martial arts fighters must be skilled at both striking and wrestling.
- 4
- 5A person with strong determination to hold out against long or severe hardship, especially illness.
The doctors gave him weeks to live, but he was a fighter and lasted another two years.
She has always been a fighter, and the long recovery after the accident was no exception.
Similarsurvivor
Oppositequitter
Note
This is a word of praise: it honors endurance rather than aggression, and it turns up most in talk of illness and recovery, as in he was a fighter to the end. That sets it apart from the combative, competitive type, who goes looking for battles; this fighter holds out against one that arrived uninvited.
- 6
- 7A video game centered on physical combat.
The studio's latest fighter adds online ranked matches and a roster of thirty characters.
Fans of classic two-dimensional fighters will feel at home with the new release.
Note
Among players the word is shorthand for fighting game, the genre built on bouts between characters, often one on one, and the two are used interchangeably: Simon Carless's Gaming Hacks (2004) moves from one-on-one fighting titles to one-on-one fighters in a single sentence. It belongs with other genre nouns named for what the player mainly does, such as shooter and racer.
- 8In science fiction, a small combat spacecraft, also called a starfighter, that does in space what a fighter plane does in the air.
The alien carrier launched a swarm of fighters toward the planet's orbital defenses.
She banked her fighter hard to dodge the laser fire from the enemy cruiser.
Similarstarfighter
Note
Science fiction moves the fighter plane into space and brings its whole setting along: in Dan Simmons's The Fall of Hyperion (1990), carriers launch more than a hundred fighters each. The word keeps its sense of scale, naming the small, quick craft set against far larger warships such as dreadnoughts; starfighter is the fuller name when a story needs to be unmistakable.
- 9A firefighter, a person employed or trained to put out fires.
More than two hundred fighters spent the night cutting lines around the wildfire.
A fighter from the local station carried the child out of the smoke.
Similarfirefighter, fireman
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English fightere, fyghtor, feghtere, from Old English feohtere; it is equivalent to fight + -er.