Booty

How to spell booty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce booty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does booty mean?

1. nounGoods, money, or valuables seized by force, theft, or in war.

Booty in a sentence

• The pirates buried their booty on a remote island.

• The burglars split the booty before the police arrived.

Where does booty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The oldest sense, meaning plunder seized in war or robbery, reached English in the late 1400s. It traces back to a Germanic word, the Middle Low German bute (also written buite), which literally meant an exchange or a sharing-out of goods, the idea being that what raiders captured was then divided among them. The word travelled into several European languages, including Old French butin, and the spelling was reshaped in English under the pull of the unrelated word boot, in its old sense of profit or advantage. The much later slang sense referring to the buttocks is a separate development, generally traced to early twentieth-century African American speech and probably an altered, playful form of bottom or its nursery diminutive botty rather than the plunder word. Because two unrelated stories ended up spelled the same way, the double o and the single t are easy to second-guess; remembering the link to loot being shared out can help fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• boot- (from Middle Low German bute: a sharing-out, plunder)
• -y (noun ending)