Butter

How to spell butter

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce butter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does butter mean?

1. nounA pale yellow fatty food made by churning cream, used as a spread and in cooking.
2. verbTo spread butter onto something such as bread.

Butter in a sentence

• noun

  She spread a thin layer of butter across the warm toast.

• verb

  She likes to butter both slices before adding the filling.

• noun

  The recipe calls for half a block of butter and two eggs.

• verb

  Please butter the rolls while the soup is heating.

Where does butter come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Butter traces back to the Latin word butyrum, which simply meant the fatty food made by churning cream. The Romans in turn borrowed it from the Greek boutyron, often explained as a compound of bous 'cow' and turos 'cheese', so the literal sense was something like 'cow cheese'. The word travelled into the Germanic languages early through trade and Roman contact, surfacing in Old English as butere, the direct ancestor of the modern spelling. The doubled 't' reflects the short, clipped vowel before it, the same pattern seen in 'gutter' and 'mutter'. Curiously, the verb sense meaning 'to flatter someone' (as in 'butter up') only developed centuries later, drawing on the idea of spreading something smooth and pleasing.

How the word is built

• butter (from Latin butyrum: butter), a single root noun/verb in modern English