buttony
Having a large number of buttons.
Adjective
- Having a large number of buttons.
- 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 […] - 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “60”, in Vanity...
- 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?
- […] the inconsistent woman fell upon his buttony breast weeping copiously. - 1873, Louisa May Alcott, chapter 16, in Work: A Story of Experience, Boston: Roberts Brothers, page 372:
- Resembling a button or buttons.
- The Stalactical, is generally of a brassy colour; and so is the blistered buttony Ore, which is protuberant in a semi-circular form […] - 1778, William Pryce, chapter 3, in Mineralogia Cornubiensis: A Treatise of...
- 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. - 1924, Ford Madox...
- […] something a little doggish peeped out of the black buttony eyes, a hint of the seraglio. - 1938, Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, London: Heinemann, published 1962, Part 2, Chapter 2, p. 83:
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Not fully grown and matured; overly small and insufficiently juicy. (of berries)
- But the little dinky, buttony or warty berries must not be packed at all. - 1912, P. M. Kiely, Southern Fruits and Vegetables for Northern Markets, St. Louis, Missouri, page 157:
- Some seasons a large number of berries are buttony. - 1917, F. W. Dixon, Small Fruit Plants Annual Catalog, Holton, Kansas, page 8:
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Full-berried. (of hops)
Origin
From button + -y.
Forms
Synonyms
Noun
- The manufacture of buttons.
- Whenever we inquired of the village girls what their occupation was, almost invariably the quaint answer ‘We do buttony’ was given. - 1906, Lady Dorothy Nevill, chapter 3, in Ralph Nevill, editor, The Reminiscences of...
- From this time onwards ‘buttony’, or making buttons, gradually became an important industry at which many people earned their livings. - 1958, Agnes Allen, chapter 12, in The Story of Clothes, New York: Roy Publishers,...
- […] 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,...
- A children’s game played with buttons.
- 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...