BUTCHERING • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Butchering

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/bˈʊtʃərɪŋ/ Listen

verb

Butcher v. t. (past & past part. butchered; pres. part. butchering)

To kill or slaughter (animals) for food, or for market; as, to butcher hogs.

To murder, or kill, especially in an unusually bloody or barbarous manner. "(Ithocles) was murdered, rather butchered."

To bungle badly; to botch; used also when an object is damaged (literally or figuratively) in an activity; as, the new choir butchered the hymn.

Synonyms: mangle.

noun

Butchering n.

The business of a butcher.

The act of slaughtering; the act of killing cruelly and needlessly. "That dreadful butchering of one another."

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Etymology of 'Butchering'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Butchering" Quotes from Famous Books

... patient's tongue sometimes being slitted or notched, and other foolish and cruel subterfuges improvised in an effort to cure the stammering. Needless to say, there was no cure found in such methods. There is no chance of curing a mental defect by slitting the tongue and the absurdities of that "butchering period" which have now passed away, are numbered among the mistakes ...

— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

... of insanity, and so Hackett escaped punishment. The jury were hardly inclined to accept these as proofs at first, inasmuch as the prisoner had never been insane before the murder, and under the tranquilizing effect of the butchering had immediately regained his right mind; but when the defense came to show that a third cousin of Hackett's wife's stepfather was insane, and not only insane, but had a nose the very counterpart of Hackett's, it was plain that insanity was hereditary in the family, and Hackett ...

— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of government. He played his part of bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible, perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he capitulates ...

— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a "pig boiler." The pig boiling must be done at a certain temperature (the pig is iron) just as a farmer butchering hogs must scald the carcasses at a certain temperature. If the farmer's water is too hot it will set the hair, that is, fix the bristles so they will never come out; if the water is not hot enough it will fail to loosen the bristles. So the farmer has to be an expert, and when the water in ...

— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... tribe believed that its god demanded a sacrifice yearly, and their priests taught them that a certain one of their number had been sent by their god for this sacrifice each year; that only by butchering this particular member of the tribe and—incredible as it sounds—eating his body and drinking his blood, could they avert drouth and pestilence and secure favours for the year to come. I remember the historian intimated ...

— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

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