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Glite Dictionary
🥩 A meat seller 💥 To ruin badly 🗡️ A ruthless killer 🔪 To cut up animals 🤦 An incompetent person
to butcher

to butcher

35 3.7
To do something very badly and ruin it
  • verb
  • /ˈbʊtʃər/
  • Informal
translation icon : estropear
  • He really butchered that joke, and no one laughed.

Oh my God, I'm well and truly butchering this shot.

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Examples

  • And that sentence was a little bit butchered, I feel.

  • Brandenburg was guilty of nothing more than butchering the English language.

    Academic text (1998)

  • All right, OK, I'm about to butcher this name so hard.

  • You butchered the whole damn cake!

    Wedding Crashers (2005)

  • I'm going to butcher this name, but it's I'd say from Denmark.

  • And I'm most certainly going to butcher this pronunciation, but spots easy, I get that right?

  • I'm probably going to butcher the names Lungosa and Opilia.

  • - And he butchered the hell out of Steve Perry's lyrics.

    Grey Skies (2010)

  • So I've been butchering names left and right trying to do my trying to do my due diligence.

    cari can read

  • Anyway, she ended up getting my number from Charlie and she texted me the punchline of this joke that she had totally butchered, from the night we met.

    The Rental (2020)

Antonyms

to master
191 4.1

To learn something very well so you can do it easily

to excel
58 3.7

To be much better than other people at an activity or subject

Compounds

butcher shop
18 1.3

A shop that sells fresh meat and poultry, sometimes fish

butcher knife
13 3.2

A large sharp knife used for cutting meat

butcher block
  • US
3 4.3

A thick wooden board used for cutting and preparing food

butcher boy
1 7.8

A young person who works in a meat shop and helps cut and wrap meat

butcher paper
  • US
1 3.3

A strong paper used for wrapping meat to stop blood or juices leaking

butcher board
  • US
6.7

Thick board made by joining strips of strong wood for use as a cutting surface

pork butcher
3.1

A person who cuts and sells pork like bacon and sausages

How Badly

to ruin
∞ 2.0
to butcher
  • Informal
35 3.7
to botch
63 6.0
to bungle
16 6.8
to mess up
  • Informal
597 2.8
to mistake
37 1.0

Surface Forms

butcher infinitive
butchered past
butchered past participle
butchering present participle
butchers third person singular

Etymology

To butcher something badly comes from the verb for cutting animals: if you cut or handle something like a careless meat cutter, you will spoil it. So to butcher a text, a speech, or a repair means to damage or ruin it by doing it very poorly.