Rapparee

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An Irish guerrilla fighter or bandit who operated during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, often engaging in irregular warfare against English forces
2. A plundering Irish irregular soldier or outlaw active in the late 1600s and early 1700s who conducted guerrilla raids and banditry
3. An Irish rebel or brigand of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries engaged in armed resistance through ambushes, theft, and irregular combat tactics

Etymology: The word "rapparee" comes from Irish "rapaire", a variant of "ropaire", which meant "cutpurse" or pickpocket. That is a long way from the sense it carries today, a guerrilla fighter, and the change reflects the turbulent history of seventeenth-century Ireland. Irish bands who had resisted English rule and then lost their land or their footing in the wars of that period took to the hills and bogs, living by raiding and plundering, and the older name for a petty thief was applied to them. Because the word began as a term for a common thief, it carried a note of contempt from the start. Those who used it were not praising the fighters but dismissing them as criminals, even as many of the men so described were soldiers of a sort, fighting on their own terms against English and Protestant settlers.