Buttery means it tastes of butter — rich, soft, faintly salty, coating the roof of your mouth. A warm buttery croissant that falls apart in your hands, buttery mashed potato, the buttery crumb of a piece of shortbread.
The word travels well beyond food, because what it really describes is a kind of smooth richness. Leather can be buttery soft, a saxophone can have a buttery tone, a wall can be painted a buttery yellow. Wine writers lean on it constantly for oaked Chardonnay. It is a compliment every time: greasy is the word for too much fat, buttery is the word for exactly enough. And a dish called buttery may hold no butter at all — it is the impression, not the recipe.
1adjectivebutteryTasting or smelling of butter — rich, soft and faintly salty.
“The pastry was warm and buttery and left crumbs everywhere.”
Patternbuttery + noun (pastry, flavour, taste) · rich and buttery · butteriness
2adjectivesmoothSmooth, soft and rich in feel, colour or sound.
“He bought a jacket in buttery soft leather.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
BUTTERy → it tastes of BUTTER
It is butter + y: warm toast that tastes and smells of melted butter.
hooks ontobutter
Buttery is butter with -y stuck on the end, and Middle English already wrote it as buttry. Butter itself came into English from Latin būtȳrum, which also gave chemistry the word butyric for the acid that makes rancid butter smell the way it does.
Middle English
buttry
English, today
buttery
From Middle English buttry, equivalent to butter + y. butyric, butter ultimately being from Latin būtȳrum and -y being a doublet of -ic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA