Other forms: butchers, butchered, butchering
A butcher is somebody who cuts and sells meat. The butcher on the high street, ask the butcher, a butcher's shop.
In British English the shop is the butcher's — go to the butcher's — with the apostrophe and no shop after it. As a verb, to butcher an animal is to cut it up for meat, and to butcher anything else is to ruin it through clumsiness: butcher a song, butcher the language. That figurative sense is common and always harsh. Note butcher's, which in Cockney rhyming slang means a look, from butcher's hook.
1nountradeSomebody whose trade is cutting and selling meat.
“The butcher will bone it for you if you ask.”
2nounbutcherA shop selling meat.
“There is a butcher two doors down from the baker.”
3verbruinTo ruin something through clumsiness.
“They butchered the song in the second verse.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
butcher is a trade.
Old French bouchier meant a slaughterer of goats, from bouc, a male goat — the same root as buck. English took the word for one animal and applied it to all of them.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰúǵs
Old French
bouchier — goat slaughterer
Middle English
bocher
English, today
butcher
From Middle English bocher, boucher, from Old French bouchier (“goat slaughterer”), from Old French bouc (“goat”), from Medieval Latin buccus (“he-goat”), from Frankish bukk, from Proto-Germanic bukkaz (“male goat, male deer”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰuǵ- (“buck, ram”). See also English buck.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA