Other forms: butterflies
A butterfly is a beautiful insect with big colourful wings. A butterfly landed, chase butterflies, butterfly wings.
The wings are covered in tiny overlapping scales, and much of the colour is structural rather than pigment — it comes from the way the scales bend light. Butterflies taste with their feet. The butterfly effect is the idea that tiny changes have large consequences in complex systems.
1nounbutterflyAn insect with large colourful wings.
“A butterfly landed on the flower and slowly opened its wings.”
butterfly is an insect.
Old English buterfleoge is butter plus fly. Why butter is disputed, one suggestion being the colour of a common species.
Middle English
boterflye
English, today
butterfly
From Middle English boterflye. From Middle English buterflie, butturflye, boterflye, from Old English buterflēoge, equivalent to butter + fly. Cognate with Dutch botervlieg, German Butterfliege (“butterfly”). The name may have originally been applied to butterflies of a yellowish color, or reflected a belief that butterflies ate milk and butter (compare German Molkendieb (“butterfly”) literally “whey-thief” and Low German Botterlicker (“butterfly”) literally “butter-licker”), or that they excreted a butter-like substance (compare Dutch boterschijte (“butterfly”) literally “butter-excretor”). Compare also German Schmetterling from Schmetten (“cream”), German Low German Bottervögel (“butterfly”) literally “butter-fowl”. More at butter, fly. An alternate theory suggests that the first element may have originally been butor- (“beater”), a mutation of bēatan (“to beat”), but this would not explain the cognates in other languages or the other names formed with milk products.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA