Word.ws English Dictionary

buttonhook

buttonhook noun: a hook for pulling the buttons of gloves and shoes through the buttonholes.

Noun

buttonhook (plural buttonhooks)

  1. (historical) A hook for pulling the buttons of gloves and shoes through the buttonholes.
    • ‘I'm sorry we are so late,’ he was saying. ‘We couldn't find a button-hook, so it took us a long time to button our boots.’1920, DH Lawrence, Women in Love, Vintage, published 2008, page 14
    • Hustlers used to sell shoes like that to the greenhorns fifty years ago with a buttonhook for a bonus.1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 370
  2. A play in which the receiver runs straight downfield, then turns back toward the line of scrimmage.
    • Yet the Bears never set up the deep patterns with a turn-in or a buttonhook[…].1988 January 15, Ted Cox, “The Sports Section”, in Chicago Reader
  3. A hook used to pull thread through the holes of a button.

Verb

buttonhook (third-person singular simple present buttonhooks, present participle buttonhooking, simple past and past participle buttonhooked)

  1. To perform the buttonhook play.

Forms of buttonhook

Noun
pluralbuttonhooks
Verb
third-person singular presentbuttonhooks
present participlebuttonhooking
past participlebuttonhooked
pastbuttonhooked

Origin of buttonhook

From button + hook.

Questions about buttonhook

What does buttonhook mean?
Buttonhook means a hook for pulling the buttons of gloves and shoes through the buttonholes.
What part of speech is buttonhook?
Buttonhook can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of buttonhook?
The plural of buttonhook is buttonhooks.

Words near buttonhook in the dictionary

  1. buttonholer
  2. buttonholers
  3. buttonholes
  4. buttonholing
  5. buttonholings
  6. buttonhook
  7. buttonhooked
  8. buttonhooking
  9. buttonhooks
  10. buttoning
  11. buttoning one's lip

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: buttonhook (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “buttonhook.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/buttonhook. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.