chop-shop

plural chop-shops

1. alternativeAlternative form of chop shop.

present singular third person chop-shops · participle present chop-shopping · participle past chop-shopped · past chop-shopped

1. transitiveTo cut apart a car in a chop shop, either to sell as parts or to alter its appearance.

   Look, the car will be clean. If you're not comfortable, you could chop-shop it.

   2007, Eric Jerome Dickey, Waking with Enemies

   2 more examples

   Sleeker, faster "muscle cars" were the rage, and so when DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz updated Batman in 1964, the Batmobile—the tank-like sedan with a bat-head grille—was chop-shopped into a sportier model.

   2009, Michael Eury, Michael Kronenberg, The Batcave Companion, page 71

   On the concrete floor were distributed groups of fenders, doors, sections of roof, hoods, and other more or less "prime cuts" of chop-shopped automobiles carefully sorted by finish and hue, ...

   2010, Mary Jane Jacob, Michelle Grabner, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, page 53

2. figurativelytransitiveby analogyTo cut something apart and restructure it.

   Plus I moved the paragraph from its original place in the manuscript to another place hundreds of pages away. In short, I chop-shopped it.

   2007, Raja Alem -, My Thousand and One Nights: A Novel of Mecca, page xii

   1 more example

   He's considered something of a scold on Wall Street, a hectoring moralist who rails against the business practices of his rivals— an old-economy guy known more for building businesses than chop-shopping them for parts, a brilliant crank with a nearly unbroken string of successful investments.

   2004, New York - Volume 37, page 16