buttony

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English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

button +‎ -y

Adjective[edit]

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,[4]
      “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[5], 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[6], 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[7], 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 ...‎[8], 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[9], 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[10], 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[11], 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[12], Holton, Kansas, page 8:
        Some seasons a large number of berries are buttony.
    2. Full-berried.[1] (of hops)

Synonyms[edit]

Noun[edit]

buttony (uncountable)

  1. The manufacture of buttons.
    • 1906, Lady Dorothy Nevill, chapter 3, in Ralph Nevill, editor, The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill‎[13], 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[14], 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[15], 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[16], 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[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Herbert Myrick, The Hop: Its Culture and Cure, Marketing and Manufacture, New York: Orange Judd, 1899, p. 272.[1]
  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.”[2]
  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 […] .”[3]
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