Butch

How to spell butch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce butch

What does butch mean?

1. adjectiveHaving or showing an emphatically masculine, tough, or rugged appearance or manner.
2. nounA person, especially a lesbian, who presents in a deliberately masculine way.

Butch in a sentence

• adjective

  He grew a thick beard and adopted a butch look for the role.

• noun

  She described herself as a butch and explained what the term meant to her.

• adjective

  The boots and leather jacket gave her outfit a butch edge.

• noun

  The documentary interviewed an older butch about life in the 1970s.

Where does butch come from?

Language of origin: Other

Butch is American slang that surfaced in the early twentieth century, and its origin is not fully settled, so it carries a note of uncertainty. The most widely accepted explanation traces it to a shortening of butcher, a name and nickname that had long been attached to tough or rough men; the personal nickname Butch was common for boys and was used to suggest a sturdy, hard-edged character. From there the word broadened to describe an aggressively masculine appearance or manner, and by the 1940s it was also being used within lesbian communities to describe a deliberately masculine self-presentation. There is a competing idea that it owes something to the short, severe haircut later called a butch cut, but the haircut sense seems to follow the masculinity sense rather than start it. Because the spelling simply mirrors the sound, the chief trap is the soft ending, which is written with the -tch cluster rather than a plain -ch.

How the word is built

• butch (single root; probably a clipped form of butcher, used as a slang adjective and noun)