Buster

How to spell buster

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce buster

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does buster mean?

1. nounAn informal, often confrontational way of addressing a man or boy.
2. nounA person or thing that breaks, smashes, or puts an end to something, especially used in compounds.

Buster in a sentence

• Listen here, buster, you cannot park in that loading bay.

• The new policy was billed as a real cartel buster in the energy market.

• The bouncer told the troublemaker that he had pushed his luck too far, buster.

• The ranch hired a skilled bronco buster to tame the new horses.

Where does buster come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Buster is an American coinage built on the verb 'bust', which is itself a colloquial variant of 'burst'. 'Burst' descends from the Old English berstan, meaning 'to break suddenly' or 'to fly apart', and the dialect pronunciation that swapped the order of the r and the vowel gave English the casual form 'bust'. Adding the agent suffix -er produced 'buster', literally 'one who breaks or smashes something', first seen in nineteenth-century America in compounds such as 'bronco buster', a rider who breaks in wild horses. From there it spread into terms like 'blockbuster' and 'crime buster' for anything that demolishes an obstacle. By the early twentieth century it had also hardened into a brash, slightly hostile way of addressing a man or boy, as in 'now listen here, buster'. The spelling is mercifully regular, since it simply joins the familiar word 'bust' to the everyday -er ending.

How the word is built

• bust (to break or smash, an American variant of burst)
• -er (agent suffix: one who or that which does)