butcher
Americannoun
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a retail or wholesale dealer in meat.
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a person who slaughters certain animals, or who dresses the flesh of animals, fish, or poultry, for food or market.
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a person guilty of brutal or indiscriminate slaughter or murder.
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a vendor who hawks newspapers, candy, beverages, etc., as on a train, at a stadium, etc.
verb (used with object)
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to slaughter or dress (animals, fish, or poultry) for market.
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to kill indiscriminately or brutally.
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to bungle; botch.
to butcher a job.
noun
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a retailer of meat
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a person who slaughters or dresses meat for market
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an indiscriminate or brutal murderer
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a person who destroys, ruins, or bungles something
verb
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to slaughter or dress (animals) for meat
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to kill indiscriminately or brutally
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to make a mess of; botch; ruin
Synonym Usage
See slaughter.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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butchersimple
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butcherssimple
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have butcheredperfect
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has butcheredperfect
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am butcheringprogressive
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are butcheringprogressive
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is butcheringprogressive
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have been butcheringperfect progressive
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has been butcheringperfect progressive
Past
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butcheredsimple
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had butcheredperfect
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was butcheringprogressive
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were butcheringprogressive
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had been butcheringperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of butcher
First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English bocher, from Anglo-French; Old French bo(u)chier, equivalent to bo(u)c “he-goat” (from unattested Gaulish bucco-; compare Old Irish boc, Welsh bwch; akin to buck 1 ) + -ier -ier 2 ( see -er 2)
Explanation
The person whose job it is to cut up and sell meat is called a butcher. Your grandmother might go to the butcher once a week to buy pork chops. A butcher is an expert at preparing cuts of meat and poultry in a butcher shop or the meat section of a supermarket. You can also call a person whose job is slaughtering farm animals a butcher. Because this is a fairly bloody, gory occupation, the word is also used to mean a cruel, ruthless murderer. And when you really mess something up, you can also be said to butcher it — like the way you butchered that poem when you tried to recite it from memory.
Vocabulary lists containing butcher
Name That Job: Occupational Last Names
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"Zlateh the Goat"
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Selection Vocabulary 1, Unit 6
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
"Store closed", reads the sign next to Alina's butcher shop.
From Barron's ● Jun. 30, 2026
“My grandmother would take me for a walk, and we’d stop into the butcher and the international grocery,” See said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 11, 2026
My dad was a butcher, my mother a butcher’s helper and then a junior-high-school teacher after my father died.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026
The Ghanaian-owned butcher shop down the street is where I go for halal chicken wings and thighs.
From Salon ● May 22, 2026
How could you butcher them when their time was up, salt and batter them, fry them up for Sunday dinner?
From "Bone Gap" by Laura Ruby
The volunteers “were butchers, bakers, candlestick makers who then fought fire when the fire bell rang,” Mr. Winkle says.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 3, 2026
The government decided not to back a previous proposal for more businesses including butchers and fishmongers to open on the public holiday.
From Barron's ● May 1, 2026
Local butchers and farmers have been brought together to help feed the 15,000-strong workforce.
From BBC ● Jan. 26, 2026
Manchester Farms Quail – Quail can be surprisingly tough to track down, even at specialty butchers, but Manchester Farms makes this delicious little bird totally accessible for home cooks.
From Salon ● Dec. 4, 2025
Inside, the butchers with their bloodstained white smocks deftly gutted the fish while customers cried out their orders and shouted, “Give me your freshest,” to which the butchers always protested, “All are freshest.”
From "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan
Busy markets sold butchered meats and fast-wilting vegetables, horse carts clattered, children shouted, and men and women gossiped in coffeehouses and read from printed newspapers.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 6, 2026
She says she has been left with a massive scar which has left her feeling "butchered".
From BBC ● Nov. 28, 2025
The 1987 movie features Schwarzenegger’s Dutch leading a multiracial band of bros on a black ops mission to eliminate guerrillas in a Central American jungle, only to be butchered by an invisible stalker from space.
From Salon ● Nov. 12, 2025
The LaPrele site in Converse County preserves the remains of a killed or scavenged sub-adult mammoth and an associated camp occupied during the time the animal was butchered almost 13,000 years ago.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 27, 2024
Archaeologists have discovered sites where entire herds were butchered annually in such ways.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
The site also contained stone tools along with the remains of elephants and other animals, suggesting the area was once used for butchering prey near the edge of an ancient lake.
From Science Daily ● May 24, 2026
He then breaks into song, trying his hand at the chant and butchering the delivery.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 27, 2026
We’ve come a long way from 1992, when Bill Clinton bypassed prime-time and Sunday political shows by wearing sunglasses and butchering “Heartbreak Hotel” on a saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 16, 2025
The fleecing of Kevin, who ProPublica agreed to identify by first name only, was a textbook example of pig butchering.
From Salon ● Jun. 26, 2025
Feeding and watering and shearing and lambing and even castrating and butchering, I do all these things.
From "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
