butter up in English

[Show JSON for postprocessed kaikki.org data shown on this page ▼] [Hide JSON for postprocessed kaikki.org data shown on this page ▲]

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "butter up",
      "raw_tags": [
        "Expression"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "expansion": "[POS TABLE]",
      "name": "expression"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "phrase",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "He takes every opportunity to butter up the boss."
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "If you butter up a person, you praise them so as to have personal gains."
      ],
      "id": "simple-butter_up-en-phrase-aupY8pBQ",
      "raw_tags": [
        "transitive",
        "figurative"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "butter up"
}

[Show JSON for raw wiktextract data ▼] [Hide JSON for raw wiktextract data ▲]

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "butter up",
      "raw_tags": [
        "Expression"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "expansion": "[POS TABLE]",
      "name": "expression"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "phrase",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "Transitive verbs"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "He takes every opportunity to butter up the boss."
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "If you butter up a person, you praise them so as to have personal gains."
      ],
      "raw_tags": [
        "transitive",
        "figurative"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "butter up"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-04-05 from the simplewiktionary dump dated 2025-04-03 using wiktextract (8c1bb29 and fb63907). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.

"butter up" meaning in English

Phrase