butting

Pluralbuttings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of butt.

   The bull spent the morning butting the new fence post.

   Butting heads with the boss, she finally handed in her notice.

   Note

   One spelling carries several verbs. From butt it can mean striking with the head, as a goat butts a gate, or meeting end to end, as boards butt against a wall. In Eastern Canada it also means cutting in line ahead of someone. The same letters spell a form of but as well, where the t doubles the way run doubles its n in running. That is the archaic "saying but" form, a different word entirely.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of striking someone or something with the head.

   The wrestler received a warning for butting during the clinch.

   A single butting from the bull was enough to topple the barrier.

   Note

   As a countable noun it can name a single blow or, in the plural, a whole run of them. Joseph Hewlett and Theodore Hook's The Parish Clerk (1841) has young sheep nearly breaking each other's skulls "by their constant tiltings and buttings," placing the jousting word and the head-blow word side by side. Unlike the boundary noun, which shares its spelling, this one is all motion.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A boundary, or the line where one piece of land meets an adjoining one; an abuttal.

   The deed described the property's western butting along the old creek.

   Surveyors recorded every butting and bound of the estate.

   Similarboundary, abuttal, border

   Note

   This noun grew from butt in its sense of meeting end to end, and it names the place where one holding stops and the next begins. It likes company. William Beveridge in 1709 writes of something "without buttings or boundings on any side," setting it beside its near-synonym. In modern prose it reads as old property language, and abuttal or boundary is the more familiar choice.

Showing meanings only. Show all 4