butcher

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈbʊtʃ.ə(ɹ)/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈbʊt͡ʃ.ɚ/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʊtʃə(ɹ)

From Middle English buccher, bucher, boucher, bocher, from Anglo-Norman boucher, Old French bouchier (“goat slaughterer”), from Old French bouc (“goat”), from Medieval Latin buccus (“he-goat”), of Germanic origin. More at English buck.

butcher (plural butchers)

1. A person who prepares and sells meat (and sometimes also slaughters the animals).
   • 1900, Charles W. Chesnutt, chapter I, in 'The House Behind the Cedars:

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

2. (figuratively) A brutal or indiscriminate killer.
   • Shakespeare

     Butcher of an innocent child.

3. (Cockney rhyming slang, from butcher's hook) A look.
4. (informal, obsolete) A person who sells candy, drinks, etc. in theatres, trains, circuses, etc.

• carnager
• mayhemist
• slayer

butcher (third-person singular simple present butchers, present participle butchering, simple past and past participle butchered)

1. (transitive) To slaughter (animals) and prepare (meat) for market.

   Synonyms: kill, slaughter

2. (transitive) To kill brutally.

   Synonyms: massacre, slay

3. (transitive) To ruin (something), often to the point of defamation.

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

   Synonym: murder

butch +‎ -er

butcher

1. comparative form of butch: more butch
   • 2003, Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender, page 170:

     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).

• Buchert