butcher

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

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• Rhymes: -ʊtʃə(ɹ)

From Middle English bocher, boucher, from 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. (figurative) A brutal or indiscriminate killer.
   • c. 1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King Iohn”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene ii]:

     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.
5. (colloquial, archaic, card games) A king playing card.

   Coordinate term: bitch

• carnager
• flesher 1
• mayhemist
• slayer 2

• → Hindi: बूचड़ (būcaṛ)
• → Swahili: bucha
• → Urdu: بُوچَڑ (būcaṛ)

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. (intransitive) To work as a butcher.
   • 2008, Monte Dwyer, Red In The Centre: The Australian Bush Through Urban Eyes, Monyer Pty Ltd, page 121:

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

3. (transitive) To kill brutally.

   Synonyms: massacre, slay

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

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

   Synonym: murder

5. (transitive) To mess up hopelessly; to botch; to distort beyond recognition.

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

   Synonyms: debase, bastardize

• (king playing card): 1873, John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary

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