what-the-butler-saw
what-the-butler-saw is the alternative form of what the butler saw.
Meaning of what the butler saw
Noun
what the butler saw
- A story or film of titillating activity observed by voyeurism.
- For the next fifteen years he would make some 500 short films there – conjuring turns, fairy stories, burlesques, what-the-butler-saws, literary adaptations, fantastic voyages and reconstructed newsreels – of which about a fifth have survived.2013 June 1, Christopher Frayling, Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema, Reaktion Books, →ISBN, page 48
- A mutoscope; an amusement machine that shows a sequence of images or animation, often of a titillating nature, viewed via a peephole
- There are two main types—the machine working on the "What the butler saw" principle, where a knob is turned for the answer and the next exciting instalment, and "a programmed text- book" with questions on one side of the page and answers covered up by a flap on the other1963, Brewers' Guild Journal
Questions about what-the-butler-saw
- What is what-the-butler-saw the alternative form of?
- What-the-butler-saw is the alternative form of what the butler saw.
Words near what-the-butler-saw in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: what-the-butler-saw (page history and authors); what the butler saw (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: “what-the-butler-saw.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/what-the-butler-saw. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.