Butcher

//ˈbʊt͡ʃ.ɚ// adj, name, noun, verb, slang

adj, name, noun, verb, slang ·Very common ·Middle school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person who prepares and sells meat (and sometimes also slaughters the animals).

    "He looked in vain into the stalls for the butcher who had sold fresh meat twice a week, on market days..."

  2. 2
    someone who makes mistakes because of incompetence wordnet
  3. 3
    A brutal or indiscriminate killer. figuratively

    "Butcher of an innocent child."

  4. 4
    a person who slaughters or dresses meat for market wordnet
  5. 5
    A look. Cockney, slang
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  1. 6
    a brutal indiscriminate murderer wordnet
  2. 7
    A person who sells candy, drinks, etc. in theatres, trains, circuses, etc. informal, obsolete
  3. 8
    a retailer of meat wordnet
  4. 9
    A king playing card. archaic, colloquial
Verb
  1. 1
    To slaughter (animals) and prepare (meat) for market. transitive
  2. 2
    kill (animals) usually for food consumption wordnet
  3. 3
    To work as a butcher. intransitive

    "He tells me he now earns three times as much as he did butchering."

  4. 4
    To kill brutally. transitive
  5. 5
    To ruin (something), often to the point of defamation. transitive

    "The band at that bar really butchered "Hotel California"."

Show 1 more definition
  1. 6
    To mess up hopelessly; to botch; to distort beyond recognition. transitive

    "I am bad at pronouncing names, so my apologies if I butcher any of your names."

Adjective
  1. 1
    comparative form of butch: more butch comparative, form-of

    "Weaver and Shaw dance together and almost immediately another butch, an even butcher butch (Leslie Feinberg), cuts in to dance with Shaw (though Shaw would kill me if she heard me call someone a butcher butch)."

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A surname originating as an occupation for a butcher.

Synonyms

All synonyms
blunderbotchbunglebunglermassacreslaughter

Example

More examples

"That ugly butcher resembles that fictional monster."

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English bocher, boucher, from Old French bouchier (“goat slaughterer”), from Old French bouc (“goat”), from Medieval Latin buccus (“he-goat”), from Frankish *bukk, from Proto-Germanic *bukkaz (“male goat, male deer”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰuǵ- (“buck, ram”). See also English buck.

Etymology 2

From butch + -er.

Related phrases

Piccadilly butcherbutcher birdbutcher blockbutcher bluebutcher boybutcher knifebutcher paperbutcher shopbutcher stripesbutcher's apronbutcher's billbutcher's block

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.