button

UK/ˈbʌtən/US/ˈbʌtən/

nounA23 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,150 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: buttons, buttoned

A button is the small round fastener you push through a hole to close a shirt. Sewn on with a few stitches, and always the first thing to come off.

The clothing sense brought a whole small vocabulary with it — a buttonhole, a button-down collar, doing your coat up. The other sense is the one you use most: the thing you press on a machine, a lift, a remote control. That gave English a set of phrases about triggering things, from pressing the button to somebody knowing exactly which buttons to push. As a verb, to button up means both to fasten and to stop talking.

Definitions of button

1nounbuttonA small disc sewn to clothing and pushed through a hole to fasten it.A2~27%
“A button had come off his cuff.”
2nounpressA part you press to operate a machine.A2~64%
“She pressed the button and waited for the lift.”
3verbfastenTo fasten with buttons.A2~9%
“He buttoned his coat against the wind.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Where it comes from

A button is a little push. Old French boton comes from boter, to push or thrust, so the thing you press and the thing you shove through a hole are the same idea.

Old French
boton
Middle English
boton
English, today
button

Built from

boter · Old French — to push; thrust

From Middle English boton, botoun, from Old French boton (Modern French bouton), from Old French bouter, boter (“to push; thrust”), ultimately from a gem - language. a doublet of bouton and Biden and beat. More at butt.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Clothes & Fashion, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 4 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

button in the wild

In the applied arts and craft, a button can be an example of folk art, studio craft, or even a miniature work of art.
Button
Terms for the "pushing" of a button include pressing, depressing, mashing, slapping, hitting, and punching.
Push-button
Other websites include more complex web content voting systems; for example, five stars or reaction buttons to show a wider range of emotion to the content.
Like button
The most familiar members of the family Porpitidae are the blue button (Porpita porpita) and the by-the-wind sailor (Velella velella).
Chondrophore
The term button is also used for a variety of plastic discs, or lammers, used by casinos to mark the status of players.
Button (poker)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

Definitions of button

1nounbuttonA small disc sewn to clothing and pushed through a hole to fasten it.A2~27%

“A button had come off his cuff.”

2nounpressA part you press to operate a machine.A2~64%

“She pressed the button and waited for the lift.”

3verbfastenTo fasten with buttons.A2~9%

“He buttoned his coat against the wind.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.