butte

See also: Butte and butté

English

Buttes in Monument Valley

Etymology

PIE word
*bʰudʰmḗn

Borrowed from French butte (mound).

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈbjuːt/
  • (Southern American English) IPA(key): /ˈbʌt/[1]
  • (file)
  • Rhymes: -uːt
  • Homophone: beaut

Noun

butte (plural buttes)

  1. (US) An isolated hill with steep sides and a flat top.
    Coordinate term: mesa
    • 2013 November 27, John Grotzinger, “The world of Mars”, in The New York Times:
      Those multitoned buttes and mesas [of the Grand Canyon], and that incandescent sequence of colorful bands that make one of the natural wonders of the world so grand, can also be found over 100 million miles away [on Mars].

Derived terms

Translations

References

  1. Hall, Joseph Sargent (1942 March 2) “1. The Vowel Sounds of Stressed Syllables”, in The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech (American Speech: Reprints and Monographs; 4), New York: King's Crown Press, →DOI, →ISBN, § 10, page 38.

Further reading

Danish

Adjective

butte

  1. definite of but
  2. plural of but

French

Etymology

Feminine form of but (aim, target).

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /byt/
  • (file)

Noun

butte f (plural buttes)

  1. small hill, mound, hillock; knoll
    Synonyms: colline, tertre, motte
  2. heap
    Faire une butte autour des plantes de pomme de terre.
    Make a heap around the potato plants.
  3. (archery) a mound of dirt upon which targets were placed to practice shooting
  4. (by extension, figurative) butt, target

Derived terms

Descendants

  • English: butte

Further reading

Latin

Noun

butte

  1. ablative singular of buttis

Middle English

Etymology

From Old English byt, bytt (small piece of land) and *butt (attested in diminutive Old English buttuc (end, small piece of land) > English buttock), from Proto-West Germanic *butt, from Proto-Germanic *buttaz (end, piece).

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /but/

Noun

butte (plural buttes)

  1. butt

Descendants

References

Norwegian Bokmål

Adjective

butte

  1. definite singular of butt
  2. plural of butt

Norwegian Nynorsk

Adjective

butte

  1. definite singular of butt
  2. plural of butt
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.