Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun colloq. A boy servant, or page, -- in allusion to the buttons on his livery.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Plural form of button.
  • noun colloquial, dated A boy servant, or page.
  • noun slang A policeman.
  • verb Third-person singular simple present indicative form of button.

Etymologies

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Examples

Comments

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  • Added to my list for the meaning "sheep droppings." Thanks, reesetee.

    October 24, 2007

  • Captured at Yorktown, "171 and 1/4 dozen buttons."

    Edit: I'm pretty sure they didn't mean sheep droppings.

    October 29, 2007

  • I like buttons. My grandmother had a big jar of buttons. On rainy days she would tip them out on a rug and we would sort them into piles, looking for patterns in colour and shape.

    October 21, 2008

  • My mother kept hers in an old-fashioned handbag. The kind that had a shallow round woven straw base, with a simple suede drawstring bag attached to that.

    October 21, 2008

  • My grandma kept hers in a big cracker tin. I played with them for hours on end.

    October 21, 2008

  • There was a fabric store near our house where my mom shopped for stuff to make all our clothes with. This store had an old chest freezer with the top door taken off. It was about half-filled with old and mismatched buttons. I used to stick my little-kid arms in it and try to touch the bottom. I remember thinking it would be cool to have an even bigger chest filled with more buttons, so I could get in it and roll around.

    P.S. I still don't mean sheep droppings.

    October 21, 2008

  • Your mother had a waaaay cooler fabric store to shop at than mine did. The one we went to had a pen on the porch to put the children in.

    October 21, 2008

  • Didn't it have any buttons?

    October 21, 2008

  • Ah, the old freezer chest o' buttons. . . . Did your eyes burn every time you went into the fabric store? Mine did. All that fabric sizing, I think.

    October 21, 2008

  • Nope, just astroturf.

    October 22, 2008

  • We refer to remote controls as "the buttons". Example sentence, "The T.V. is too loud, do you have the buttons?"

    July 15, 2009