buttony

English

Etymology

From button +‎ -y.

Adjective

buttony (comparative more buttony, superlative most buttony)

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.
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

(resembling a button): buttonlike

Noun

buttony (uncountable)

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 […]
(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

(manufacture of buttons): buttonmaking

References

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

[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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