Other forms: butters, buttered
Butter is the soft yellow fat you spread on toast. Salted butter, melt the butter, bread and butter.
It is made by churning cream until the fat separates, and it is about eighty per cent fat by law in Britain and the EU. The colour comes from carotene in the grass, so it is deeper in summer. Note bread and butter, meaning the basic living; butter somebody up; and butter wouldn't melt, said of somebody who looks far too innocent.
1nounbutterThe soft yellow fat made by churning cream.
“Butter is about eighty per cent fat by law.”
2verbspreadTo spread butter on something.
“She buttered the warm toast and added a spoonful of honey.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
butter is a dairy fat.
Latin butyrum comes from Greek boutyron, apparently cow cheese — bous, an ox, plus tyros, cheese. The word was borrowed into Germanic before English reached Britain.
Proto-Indo-European
*tewh₂-
Middle English
buter
English, today
butter
Built from
From Middle English buter. From Middle English buter, butter, from Old English butere, from Proto-West Germanic buterā, from Latin būtȳrum, from Ancient Greek βούτῡρον (“cow cheese”), compound of βοῦς (“ox, cow”) and τῡρός (“cheese”). Cognate with Dutch boter and German Butter.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA