Is "prepper" a word that an average English speaking person understands?

Is prepper a word that an average English speaking person understands (and also uses)?

Solution 1:

No, prepper is not common English (my spellchecker marks it as wrong) and out of context most English speakers would not understand it: potential meanings might include someone attending a preparatory school (more commonly preppy) or somebody preparing others for an exam (more commonly crammer or private tutor).

Apparently it is used to mean a kind of survivalist, as in this recent Reuters' article which says

Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as "preppers." Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

So prepper is slang from a subculture, and not widely used outside that subculture.

Solution 2:

I suppose that a prepper is somebody who preps (i.e., prepares) for something, perhaps a test. If it were used in a clear context, I expect many English speakers would understand it, but I don't know how we would discover that without doing an experiment. As for the question of whether the average English speaker uses it, it doesn't appear at all in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, so I think it's safe to say that it is not at all commonly used.