butcher [ME] The origin of butcher may tell us something about the diet of early Europeans. It goes back to a French word boc meaning ‘male goat’ that is probably related to *buck ‘male deer’. A butcher was originally more a slaughterman than a salesman, and the word very quickly came to refer to a person responsible for the slaughter of many people, a brutal murderer. See also shambles. Butch for ‘masculine’ may be a shortening of the word. It appears in the US as a shortening of butcher in the mid 19th century, was a nickname for a tough or fit man in the 1870s, describes a short haircut in the 1930s, and describes a ‘masculine’ woman in the 1940s. In the phrase to have a butcher’s, ‘to have a look’, butcher’s is short for butcher’s hook, rhyming slang for ‘a look’. The first known printed example dates from the 1930s.