What is "zipper"

1925, probably an agent noun from zip (v.1). The trademark taken out on the name that year applied to a boot with zippers, not to the "lightning fastener" itself, which was so called by 1927.

n. 1 (context chiefly US Australia English) A zip fastener. 2 A pressure-sensitive plastic closure. 3 (context biochemistry English) leucine zipper vb. 1 to close a zipper. 2 to put a zipper on an article.

1. n. a fastener for locking together two toothed edges by means of a sliding tab [syn: slide fastener, zip, zip-fastener]

2. v. close with a zipper; "Zip up your jacket--it's cold" [syn: zip up, zip] [ant: unzip]

A zipper, zip, fly or zip fastener, formerly known as a clasp locker, is a commonly used device for binding the edges of an opening of fabric or other flexible material, like on a garment or a bag. It is used in clothing (e.g., jackets and jeans), luggage and other bags, sporting goods, camping gear (e.g. tents and sleeping bags), and other items. Whitcomb L. Judson was an American inventor from Chicago who invented and constructed a workable zipper. The method, still in use today, is based on interlocking teeth. Initially it was called the “hookless fastener” and was later redesigned to become more reliable.

In BDSM terms, a zipper is a string of clothespins or other clips, held together loosely by a cord or light chain.

The skin is clipped in the clips for a short time, then the cord is pulled, causing the clips to be pulled off the skin one by one in sequence causing a "zip" sound, and a unique sensation. Zippers come in many sizes and with varied numbers of clips. They are a very popular home-made BDSM toy. A zipper can also be created with temporary piercing needles. Zippers are commonly incorporated in predicament bondage.

The Zipper is an amusement ride invented by Joseph Brown under Chance Rides in 1968. Popular at carnivals and amusement parks in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it features strong vertical G-forces, numerous spins, and a noted sense of unpredictability. Chance Rides has manufactured more than 200 units since the ride's debut.

Most models of the Zipper follow a similar basic format: A long, rotating, oval boom with a cable around its edge that pulls 12 cars around the ride. Except at peak times, most operators will only fill half of the cars at one time with riders. Like most carnival equipment, the ride is designed to be portable; it can be disassembled onto a truck and transported from site to site.

Though a staple of amusement parks and carnivals, the original models of the Zipper garnered a reputation for being unsafe due to their rough nature, and a series of deaths on the rides in the late 1970s after cabin doors came unlatched led to a series of revisions, primarily restructuring of the door lock system. No less, the ride has amassed a cult following over its decades in operation, and was named by Popular Mechanics as one of the strangest amusement park rides in the world.

A zipper is a technique of representing an aggregate data structure so that it is convenient for writing programs that traverse the structure arbitrarily and update its contents, especially in purely functional programming languages. The zipper was described by Gérard Huet in 1997. It includes and generalizes the gap buffer technique sometimes used with arrays.

The zipper technique is general in the sense that it can be adapted to lists, trees, and other recursively defined data structures. Such modified data structures are usually referred to as "a tree with zipper" or "a list with zipper" to emphasize that the structure is conceptually a tree or list, while the zipper is a detail of the implementation.

A layman's explanation for a tree with zipper would be an ordinary computer filesystem with operations to go to parent (often cd ..), and the possibility to go downwards (cd subdirectory). The zipper is the pointer to the current path. Behind the scenes the zippers are efficient when making (functional) changes to a data structure, where a new, slightly changed, data structure is returned from an edit operation (instead of making a change in the current data structure).

A zipper is a device for temporarily joining two edges of fabric together.

Zipper(s) may also refer to:

In transportation:

• Zenair Zipper, an ultralight aircraft
• Zoe Zipper, a microcar sold by Zoe Motors in the early 1980s
• Call sign for the airline Zip

In entertainment:

• The Zippers, a band
• Zipper Harris, a character in the Doonesbury universe
• Zipper (Rescue Rangers), a character in the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers universe
• Zipper (ride), an amusement ride
• Zipper Interactive, a video game developer
• Zipper (film), a 2015 political thriller

Other uses:

• Operation Zipper, a Second World War British plan
• Herbert Zipper (1904-1997), Austrian composer, conductor and arts activist
  • Zipper Hall, a music venue on the campus of the Colburn School in Los Angeles, California
• Zipper Creek (Alaska)
• Zipper (data structure), a data structure that traverses and updates an underlying data structure
• .219 Zipper, a rifle cartridge made by Winchester Repeating Arms
• Zipper storage bag
• Zipper (BDSM), a sexual practice which involves "zipping" the skin
• The name for the news ticker in Times Square New York
• Barrier transfer machine or zipper machine, used for moving concrete lane dividers

Zipper is a 2015 political thriller film, written and directed by Mora Stephens, starring Patrick Wilson, Lena Headey, Dianna Agron, Richard Dreyfuss, Ray Winstone, and Penelope Mitchell. The film had its world premiere on January 27, 2015 at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was released on August 28, 2015, in a limited release in the United States and through video on demand by Alchemy. The film follows a federal prosecutor running for office who cannot stop himself from sleeping with high-class escorts, putting both his career and his personal life at risk. The movie is a thinly veiled dramatization of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal.