A gunfighter is a person who fights with a gun — especially the kind of person you meet in stories of the old American West, known for being fast and deadly with a pistol. It is the fighter, not the fight. (The fight itself is a gunfight; the shooting and the noise are gunfire.) The word belongs to films, books, and history-as-story more than to ordinary life today; you would not usually call a modern soldier or a police officer a gunfighter. It can sound a little admiring, like a title, which is why stories use it for both heroes and outlaws. Countable: one gunfighter, a famous gunfighter. Built from gun + fighter, a person who fights.