Word.ws English Dictionary

bull butter

bull butter noun: margarine.

Noun

bull butter (uncountable)

  1. (dated, derogatory) margarine
    • About one-third of this importation was margarine, which in America was called "bull butter."1892, R. Henry Rew, “An inquiry into the statistics of the production and consumption of milk in Great Britain.”, in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, volume 55, page 285
  2. (euphemistic, slang, literal or figurative) bullshit
    • (for you city folks, bull butter is that black, smelly substance found in piles all over cow pastures) but in your case, the bull butter ain't on the outside.2014, Ken English, More COMMON Sense, page 86

Origin of bull butter

From bull + butter.

Questions about bull butter

What does bull butter mean?
Bull butter means margarine.
What part of speech is bull butter?
Bull butter is a noun.

Words near bull butter in the dictionary

  1. bull and cow
  2. bull ant
  3. bull ants
  4. bull bar
  5. bull bars
  6. bull butter
  7. bull con
  8. bull cons
  9. bull cut
  10. bull cuts
  11. bull daisies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bull butter (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-bull butter.ogg.

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