butte

Etymology

It is borrowed from French butte (“knoll, hillock”),^[2][3][4][5] which Dictionary.com takes through the French of North America,^[6] from bute (“mound of earth behind an archery target”),^[2][7] related to but (“target; mound, knoll”).^{[4][8][9][10]} The OED records the Old French butte for a mound on which a target was set for archery from 1225, and for a small hill or mound from about 1375, and takes the family as a borrowing from a Germanic language, probably early Scandinavian.^[3] The Oxford Dictionary of English calls the Old French word of unknown origin.^[11] The same French source gave English butt in the senses of a target and of an archery mound.^[7][4][2]

Earliest recorded meaning

A conspicuous, isolated hill with steep sides: 1805, in William Clark's journal of the Lewis and Clark expedition, where it appears as a French word.^[3][12][4] Etymonline calls it a relic of the French exploration of the upper Missouri.^[4]

Semantic evolution

The Dictionary of American Regional English has a much earlier instance, a 1659 record from Providence, Rhode Island, of two little hills called "Bailyes Buttes",^[13] and Dictionary.com dates the word to 1650–60 as an Americanism.^[6] The 1989 edition of the OED first recorded it in 1838; the revised OED has Clark's 1805 journal.^[14][3] In 1845 the explorer Frémont wrote that the French word was naturalized in the Rocky Mountains and had no exact English equivalent, being used of detached hills and ridges too high to be called hills and too low to be called mountains; he thought knob the nearest English term.^[15][13] The word is chiefly Western in the United States^[13] and is also used in Canada, where such hills are especially common in southern Alberta.^[16][8]

Timeline

• 1659 – Buttes in the name of two small hills in Providence, Rhode Island.^[13]
• 1805 – an isolated steep-sided hill, in William Clark's journal.^[3][12][2] The 1989 edition of the OED dated it to 1838.^[14]
• 1845 – Frémont describes the word as naturalized in the Rocky Mountains.^[15][13]

Meanings

Noun

1. An isolated hill or small mountain with steep sides and a flat, rounded or pointed top, rising abruptly from the plain around it, especially in the western United States and Canada: The trail circled a lone butte on the prairie.^[3][2][8][7]

Related words

• butt
• abut

Usage notes

A butte is similar to a mesa but narrower, with a smaller summit area;^[5][17] Weekley calls it a small mesa.^[18] Merriam-Webster Unabridged notes that a butte may be a mass left isolated by erosion, a volcanic cone or an exposed volcanic neck.^[2]

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
3. ^ a b c d e f Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
7. ^ a b c The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
9. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ Partridge, Eric (1966), Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 4th ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
11. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
12. ^ a b Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
13. ^ a b c d e Cassidy, Frederic G. & Joan Houston Hall (eds.) (1985–2002), Dictionary of American Regional English, vols I–IV, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
14. ^ a b Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
15. ^ a b Bartlett, John Russell (1848), Dictionary of Americanisms, New York: Bartlett and Welford
16. ^ Dollinger, Stefan, ed., A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, 3rd ed. (online), Vancouver: University of British Columbia, dchp.arts.ubc.ca
17. ^ Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003), 11th ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
18. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray