butcher

1. 1.

   kill (animals) usually for food consumption

   “They slaughtered their only goat to survive the winter”

   Synonymsslaughter

   Broaderkill

   Narrowerchine

Other forms of butcher

plural

butchers·

past tense

butcherred·

present participle

butcherring·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about butcher

What does butcher mean?

butcher means "a retailer of meat". That is the primary sense; the word has 5 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in butcher?

butcher has 2 syllables: but-cher. The stress falls on "but". In IPA it is /ˈbʊtʃɚ/.

What is another word for butcher?

Close synonyms include meatman, slaughterer, bungler, blunderer, fumbler. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is butcher a common word?

butcher is banded "Common" — everyday vocabulary in speech and writing. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.