Butterfly

How to spell butterfly

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce butterfly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does butterfly mean?

1. nounA flying insect with a slender body and large, often brightly patterned wings.
2. nounA swimming stroke in which both arms sweep forward together while the legs kick in unison.

Butterfly in a sentence

• A bright orange butterfly landed on the garden fence.

• He won the butterfly event at the regional swimming final.

• The museum exhibit traced how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

• The coach spent the morning correcting her butterfly technique in the pool.

Where does butterfly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Butterfly comes straight from the Old English buttorfleoge, a compound of butere, meaning 'butter', and fleoge, meaning 'fly' or 'flying insect'. Why the creature was linked to butter is genuinely uncertain, and lexicographers offer several explanations: one old belief held that butterflies stole milk and butter, another points to the pale yellow colour of many common European species, and a third connects it to the colour of the insect's excrement. The word is recorded in English long before the Norman Conquest, making it one of the oldest insect names in the language. Because both halves are everyday native words, the spelling is transparent once you see it as 'butter' plus 'fly', and the only mild trap is remembering the double 't' that comes from 'butter'. Related Germanic forms exist, such as the Dutch botervlieg, showing the same butter-and-fly pairing across languages.

How the word is built

• butter (from Old English butere)
• fly (from Old English flēoge, a flying insect)