buttony

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English

Etymology

From button +‎ -y.

Adjective

buttony (comparative more buttony, superlative most buttony)

  1. Having a large number of buttons.
    • 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “60”, in Vanity Fair , London: Bradbury and Evans , published 1848, →OCLC:
      That carriage came round to Gillespie Street every day; that buttony boy sprang up and down from the box with Emmy’s and Jos’s visiting-cards […]
    • 1869, W. S. Gilbert, “Bob Polter” in Bab Ballads, p. 179,
      “And will my whiskers curl so tight?
      My cheeks grow smug and muttony?
      My face become so red and white?
      My coat so blue and buttony?
    • 1873, Louisa May Alcott, chapter 16, in Work: A Story of Experience‎, Boston: Roberts Brothers, page 372:
      […] the inconsistent woman fell upon his buttony breast weeping copiously.
    • 1997, Kate Wheeler, “Improving My Average”, in Not Where I Started From‎, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, page 5:
      That night I lay on a buttony mildewed company mattress between my favorite sheets.
  2. Resembling a button or buttons.
    • 1778, William Pryce, chapter 3, in Mineralogia Cornubiensis: A Treatise of Minerals, Mines, and Mining‎, London: for the author, page 62:
      The Stalactical, is generally of a brassy colour; and so is the blistered buttony Ore, which is protuberant in a semi-circular form […]
    • 1924, Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not ...‎, Part 1, Chapter 6:
      Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flowers.
    • 1938, Graham Greene, Brighton Rock‎, London: Heinemann, published 1962, Part 2, Chapter 2, p. 83:
      […] something a little doggish peeped out of the black buttony eyes, a hint of the seraglio.
    • 1993, John Updike, “The Black Room”, in Prize Stories 1995: The O. Henry Awards‎, New York: Doubleday, published 1995, page 279:
      […] the street had been widened at the expense of a row of sycamores whose blotched bark and buttony seed pods had seemed oddly toylike to him, as if God were an invisible playmate.
    1. Not fully grown and matured; overly small and insufficiently juicy. (of berries)
      • 1912, P. M. Kiely, Southern Fruits and Vegetables for Northern Markets‎, St. Louis, Missouri, page 157:
        But the little dinky, buttony or warty berries must not be packed at all.
      • 1917, F. W. Dixon, Small Fruit Plants Annual Catalog‎, Holton, Kansas, page 8:
        Some seasons a large number of berries are buttony.
    2. Full-berried.[1] (of hops)

Synonyms

Noun

buttony (uncountable)

  1. The manufacture of buttons.
    • 1906, Lady Dorothy Nevill, chapter 3, in Ralph Nevill, editor, The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill‎, London: Edward Arnold, page 33:
      Whenever we inquired of the village girls what their occupation was, almost invariably the quaint answer ‘We do buttony’ was given.
    • 1958, Agnes Allen, chapter 12, in The Story of Clothes‎, New York: Roy Publishers, page 113:
      From this time onwards ‘buttony’, or making buttons, gradually became an important industry at which many people earned their livings.
    • 2007, Tracy Chevalier, Burning Bright‎, New York: Dutton, Part 4, Chapter 4, p. 126:
      […] she busied herself in the front room, rustling about in Anne Kellaway’s box of buttony materials filled with rings of various sizes, chips of sheep horn for the Singletons, a ball of flax for shaping round buttons, bits of linen for covering them, both sharp and blunt needles, and several different colors and thicknesses of thread.
    • 2010, David Hilliam, Little Book of Dorset:
      Catastrophically for Dorset buttony, Ashton's buttonmaking machine was invented in 1850 and proudly exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. As a consequence of this invention, the Dorset cottage industry collapsed virtually overnight […]
  2. (Scotland, games) A children’s game played with buttons.[2][3]
    • 1896, J. M. Barrie, chapter 15, in Sentimental Tommy‎, London: Cassell, page 172:
      She collected all her treasures, the bottle with the brass top that she had got from Shovel’s old girl, […] the pretty buttons Tommy had won for her at the game of buttony, the witchy marble, […] these and some other precious trifles she made a little bundle of and set off for Double Dykes with them, intending to leave them at the door.

Synonyms

References

  1. ^ Herbert Myrick, The Hop: Its Culture and Cure, Marketing and Manufacture, New York: Orange Judd, 1899, p. 272.
  2. ^ Alexander Warrack (ed.), The Concise Scots Dictionary, New York: Crescent, 1989, originally published in 1911, p. 66: “a children’s game in which the players, with eyes shut and palms open, guess who has received a button form another player who passes along the line in which they stand.”
  3. ^ Iona and Peter Opie, Children’s Games with Things, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 117: “‘Buttony’ is played in a variety of ways . In the basic game a circle is drawn on the ground and the players each throw or flick one of their buttons from about 6 or 8 feet away. If anybody’s button rests in the circle, the thrower is entitled without further argument to every button so far thrown .”
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