buttony

buttony adjective: having a large number of buttons.

Adjective

buttony (comparative more buttony, superlative most buttony)

Having a large number of buttons.
- That carriage came round to Gillespie Street every day; that buttony boy sprang up and down from the box with Emmy’s and Jos’s visiting-cards […]1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “60”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC
- “And will my whiskers curl so tight?
  My cheeks grow smug and muttony?
  My face become so red and white?
  My coat so blue and buttony?1869, W. S. Gilbert, “Bob Polter” in Bab Ballads, p. 179
Resembling a button or buttons.
- The Stalactical, is generally of a brassy colour; and so is the blistered buttony Ore, which is protuberant in a semi-circular form […]1778, William Pryce, chapter 3, in Mineralogia Cornubiensis: A Treatise of Minerals, Mines, and Mining, London: for the author, page 62
- Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flowers.1924, Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not ..., Part 1, Chapter 6
1. Not fully grown and matured; overly small and insufficiently juicy. (of berries)
  - But the little dinky, buttony or warty berries must not be packed at all.1912, P. M. Kiely, Southern Fruits and Vegetables for Northern Markets, St. Louis, Missouri, page 157
  - Some seasons a large number of berries are buttony.1917, F. W. Dixon, Small Fruit Plants Annual Catalog, Holton, Kansas, page 8
2. Full-berried. (of hops)

Noun

buttony (uncountable)

The manufacture of buttons.
- Whenever we inquired of the village girls what their occupation was, almost invariably the quaint answer ‘We do buttony’ was given.1906, Lady Dorothy Nevill, chapter 3, in Ralph Nevill, editor, The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill, London: Edward Arnold, page 33
- From this time onwards ‘buttony’, or making buttons, gradually became an important industry at which many people earned their livings.1958, Agnes Allen, chapter 12, in The Story of Clothes, New York: Roy Publishers, page 113
Synonyms:

buttonmaking
(Scotland) A children’s game played with buttons.
- She collected all her treasures, the bottle with the brass top that she had got from Shovel’s old girl, […] the pretty buttons Tommy had won for her at the game of buttony, the witchy marble, […] these and some other precious trifles she made a little bundle of and set off for Double Dykes with...1896, J. M. Barrie, chapter 15, in Sentimental Tommy, London: Cassell, page 172

buttony meaning in Tamil

buttony in Tamil

பல பொத்தான்களையுடைய, பொத்தானைப் போன்ற

Examples of buttony in a sentence

[…] the inconsistent woman fell upon his buttony breast weeping copiously.1873, Louisa May Alcott, chapter 16, in Work: A Story of Experience, Boston: Roberts Brothers, page 372:
That night I lay on a buttony mildewed company mattress between my favorite sheets.1997, Kate Wheeler, “Improving My Average”, in Not Where I Started From, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, page 5:
[…] something a little doggish peeped out of the black buttony eyes, a hint of the seraglio.1938, Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, London: Heinemann, published 1962, Part 2, Chapter 2, p. 83:
[…] the street had been widened at the expense of a row of sycamores whose blotched bark and buttony seed pods had seemed oddly toylike to him, as if God were an invisible playmate.1993, John Updike, “The Black Room”, in Prize Stories 1995: The O. Henry Awards, New York: Doubleday, published 1995, page 279:

Synonyms of buttony

Forms of buttony

comparative	more buttony
superlative	most buttony

Origin of buttony

From button + -y.

Questions about buttony

What does buttony mean?: Buttony means having a large number of buttons.
What is buttony in Tamil?: Buttony in Tamil is பல பொத்தான்களையுடைய, பொத்தானைப் போன்ற. See Buttony meaning in Tamil.
How do you use buttony in a sentence?: […] the inconsistent woman fell upon his buttony breast weeping copiously.
What part of speech is buttony?: Buttony can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near buttony in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: buttony (page history and authors); buttony (Tamil Wiktionary) (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: 2026-09-02

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