Word.ws English Dictionary

buttle

buttle verb: to serve as or perform the duties of a butler.

Verb

buttle (third-person singular simple present buttles, present participle buttling, simple past and past participle buttled)

  1. (humorous, nonstandard) To serve as or perform the duties of a butler.
    • ...even the stoic and impeccable maid of Miss Ethelwyn Arthur-Jones, who ‘buttled’ as well as the most time-honoured butler.1909, J. T. Grein, Sunday Times
    • Houses where Negroes buttled or cooked were marked for a visit.1989, Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War

Proper noun capitalized: Buttle

Buttle

  1. A surname.

Forms of buttle

third-person singular presentbuttles
present participlebuttling
past participlebuttled
pastbuttled
alternative formbutle

Origin of buttle

Back-formation from butler. Compare bottle (verb).

Questions about buttle

What does buttle mean?
Buttle means to serve as or perform the duties of a butler.
What part of speech is buttle?
Buttle can be a verb or a proper noun.
What is the past tense of buttle?
The past tense of buttle is buttled.

Words near buttle in the dictionary

  1. Buttkes
  2. buttkicker
  3. buttkickers
  4. buttkisser
  5. buttkissers
  6. buttle
  7. buttled
  8. buttlegger
  9. buttleggers
  10. buttlegging
  11. Buttleman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: buttle (page history and authors); Buttle (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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Cite this entry: “buttle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/buttle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.