trooper
/ˈtruːpə
/noun
1A private soldier in a cavalry or armoured unit.Behind the Colonel were his hand picked unit of super troopers....
- Four royal cavalry troopers in ceremonial armour and helmets took up watch around the coffin with swords drawn and heads bowed.
- At Fort Knox, the Armor Center trains troopers, tankers, and leaders from privates to colonels - over 20,000 a year, as a matter of fact.
1.1A cavalry horse.Command Sergeant Major Kellman, your Armor / Cavalry troopers are magnificent....
- The public love to spend time, as our Adjutant so eloquently put it, talking to the horses and patting the troopers!
1.2chiefly British A troopship.Every trooper, every transport, every ship is brought together in a massive armada for the invasion....
- He sailed on the Empire Trooper from Durban in 1943 to Bombay.
2chiefly US A mounted police officer.It also employed black troopers in the Native Mounted Police for punitive expeditions to track down and kill resisting tribes....
- His philosophy was not relevant to wars fought earlier with different weapons and armor, or even those wars when the hand gun became the common and preferred weapon of choice for the mounted trooper.
- When he was told of his own dastardly deeds, he acted the part of an innocent bystander and watched in amusement as half a dozen troopers and police, joined by several civilians galloped off at great speed in search of the highwayman.
2.1US A state police officer.Radar detectors do just that - detect radar beams that are being distributed from the radar guns of police officers or state troopers....
- Many speeding tickets are issued in so-called speed traps, where police officers or state troopers effectively hide their cars and lie in wait for speedy passers-by.
- The main benefit of a radar detector is to make you aware of police officers or state troopers in the area.
3A reliable and uncomplaining person: he was a real trooper for going on while he was feeling less than his best she even managed to sign some autographs one-handed—what a trooper!
The traditional spelling for the sense ‘a reliable and uncomplaining person’ is trouper, not trooper. More than two thirds of examples of this use in the Oxford English Corpus are spelled trooper, however, and this form has become common even in edited text. Nonetheless, trooper is still regarded by many as incorrect
Phrases
swear like a trooper