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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
butchery
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A horrible series of futile uprisings against impossible odds and always ending in butchery and defeat for the rebels.
▪ He had a slight grievance against the landowner, we understand, but hardly enough to account for this butchery.
▪ I have felt the same shock and outrage since I lived in the Lakeside area and watched the butchery of those trees.
▪ It was born of fear for her grandfather, he thought as he returned to his butchery of the President's shotgun.
▪ It was not fighting, it was butchery.
▪ One can easily imagine how this apparent butchery of corpses might be misinterpreted by a stranger unaccustomed to such a practice.
▪ They feared that their troops might acquire a taste for such butchery and become no better than those they fought against.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Butchery

Butchery \Butch"er*y\, n. [OE. bocherie shambles, fr. F. boucherie. See Butcher, n.]

  1. The business of a butcher. [Obs.]

  2. Murder or manslaughter, esp. when committed with unusual barbarity; great or cruel slaughter.
    --Shak.

    The perpetration of human butchery.
    --Prescott.

  3. A slaughterhouse; the shambles; a place where blood is shed. [Obs.]

    Like as an ox is hanged in the butchery.
    --Fabyan.

    Syn: Murder; slaughter; carnage. See Massacre.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
butchery

"the trade of a butcher," mid-15c., bocherie, from Old French bocherie (13c., Modern French boucherie), from bochier (see butcher (n.)).

Wiktionary
butchery

Etymology 1 n. 1 The cruel, ruthless killings of humans, as at a slaughterhouse. 2 (context rare English) An abattoir, a slaughterhouse. 3 The butchering of meat. 4 A disastrous effort, an atrocious failure. 5 A meat market Etymology 2

n. (context slang English) The stereotypical behaviors and accoutrements of being a butch lesbian.

WordNet
butchery
  1. n. a building where animals are butchered [syn: abattoir, shambles, slaughterhouse]

  2. the business of a butcher [syn: butchering]

  3. the savage and excessive killing of many people [syn: slaughter, massacre, mass murder, carnage]

Usage examples of "butchery".

It was avast butchery, 623,000 dead on both sides, and 471,000 wounded, over a million dead and wounded in a country whose population was 30 million.

Thus, Gord had come upon the wicked commander of the fortress lost in his butchery, attacked, and slain him.

With one sweep he eliminated the centuries-old butchery of lobotomy and topectomy which had maimed hundreds of thousands in its long fad.

The listeners were tough brutal men, long used to the ways of Brigandry, but they listened in growing horror to the stories of butchery, rape and naked blood-lust.

Throughout, the metaphor of brother against brother is a kind of metonymy for civil butchery in which family members slaughter one another in a grim contest of reciprocity.

Everything else was west of the pens and court, and the area closest to the pens was devoted to the butchery.

At the very edge of the area of the pens, just past the butchery, where pens and open courtyards gave way to real buildings with roofs and doors, was his next destination.

A simple job of butchery in aftertimes somehow becomes translated into a chivalrous encounter.

Regulus of the Isles, Sheriff of Inverness, and always a most pious Servant of Our Lord Jesus Christ, will have no dealings with honorless, foresworn pagan heretics who delight in the butchery of women and children.

The moon period was reserved exclusively for butchery in the prisons, and from time to time this was arranged for him as a reward for a successful operation in cold blood.

These were the Hazaras, who recalled the Taliban butchery of their people three years before.

In modern east-central Africa, envy between Hutu and Tutsi led to some of the worst butchery ever seen.

Without emotion Olmec told of hideous battles fought in black corridors, of ambushes on twisting stairs, and red butcheries.

We seen that without the butchery of the boulevards, if he had not saved his perjury by a massacre, if he had not sheltered his crime by another crime, Louis Bonaparte was lost.

The most deadly reigns, the greatest butcheries of the most terrible conquerors, had never resulted in such massacre.