butty
butty Lexical Profile
butty Game Scores & Validity
• noun
British A sandwich, especially one made with buttered bread and a hot filling such as bacon or chips.
"After a long morning walk in Yorkshire, we stopped at a local cafe for a warm bacon butty and a cup of tea."
British A close friend, workmate, or companion (used especially as a friendly form of address in Wales and parts of England).
"He greeted his old butty from the valleys with a warm handshake."
British Historically, a middleman or contractor in a coal mine who negotiated with the mine owner to extract coal at a set price per ton and hired his own crew of miners.
"Under the nineteenth-century subcontracting system, the butty paid the colliers out of the sum he received from the colliery owner."
British An unpowered canal narrowboat built without an engine and designed to be towed behind a powered motorboat to increase cargo capacity.
"The working narrowboat chugged steadily along the Grand Union Canal, towing a heavily laden butty behind it."
• Rhymes for butty
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
In its culinary sense, the word is a 19th-century Northern English diminutive of 'butter' (originally meaning a slice of buttered bread). In its sense meaning a friend or coal-mining partner, it is a mid-18th-century dialectal alteration of 'booty' (in the obsolete sense of 'sharing equally', from 'booty fellow'), which likely later gave rise to the American English word 'buddy'.