Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of buĉi
Coloured illustration of buĉi
#2421 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

to slaughter (an animal for meat); to butcher

Word origin

From French boucher and English butcher, both from Old French bochier, a dealer in goat meat, from Medieval Latin buccus, a he-goat. The trade was named after the animal it started with, and the name outlived the speciality.

Origin
Old French
Root
bochier
English cognates
butcher

Examples

, .

He slaughtered the pig, and the whole village got meat.

.

The law does not allow animals to be slaughtered in the village.

, .

She could not slaughter the sheep herself, so she sold it.

is transitive and specific: it is killing an animal for meat, in the matter-of-fact register a farm or a butcher's shop uses. It is not the general word for killing, which is , and it is not a word for violence against people unless you are deliberately reaching for the shock of the metaphor.

The derivations are exactly the ones you would predict. o is the butcher, the person whose trade this is. o is the place, an abattoir. o is the meat as a product. And amasbuĉi, built on amaso, is to massacre, which is the one place the root is applied to people and where the ugliness is the point.

Its neighbours in the meat vocabulary are already on the site: bovo the ox, porko the pig, ŝafo the sheep and tranĉi the cutting. Esperanto does not copy the English trick where the animal is Anglo-Saxon and the meat on the plate is Norman French, so there is no beef/cow split to learn: bova is beef, and the pig stays a pig all the way to the table.

Where this fits

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Esperanto · Free printables

buĉi: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "buĉi" (to slaughter (an animal for meat); to butcher): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.

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This word is part of lesson 49.