1 a person whose job is cutting up and selling meat in a shop/store or killing animals for this purpose
2 (butcher's) (plural butchers) a shop/store that sells meat:
He owns the butcher's in the main street.
3 a person who kills people in a cruel and violent way
IDIOMS
have / take a butcher's (BrE, slang) to have a look at sth
ORIGIN From rhyming slang, in which butcher's hook stands for 'look'.
verb [VN]
1 to kill people in a very cruel and violent way
2 to kill animals and cut them up for use as meat
3 (especially AmE) to spoil sth by doing it very badly:
The script was good, but those guys butchered it.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for butcher is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is butcher a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, butcher is tagged as noun.
Does butcher appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — butcher appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
