butler

A butler is the chief servant in a household. The word comes to us from Anglo-Norman, the variety of French spoken in England following the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman word was botiller, a cup-bearer or servant who served wine, recorded from the mid twelfth century. The word ultimately comes from the Anglo-Latin buticularius, recorded from the late eighth century. It is cognate with the word bottle, which is from the Anglo-Norman botel and the medieval Latin buticula. 

The role of a butler has shifted over the centuries, acquiring more responsibilities and authority as the centuries passed. Once simply a cupbearer, the butler would go on to acquire responsibility for a household’s wine cellar and eventually to become the chief servant.

Butler starts appearing in English in the thirteenth century. One of the earliest appearances is in the poem Iacob and Iosep, where it is used in the sense of a cupbearer:

Hit fel in one niȝte þe botiler feng to slepe,
A swiþe muri sweuene him þuȝte þat he gan mete,
Þat in þe winȝarde þe kinges coupe he ber,
& wrong hit of þe grapes ful of win cler.

(It happened one night that the butler fell asleep, a very merry dream came to him that he began to dream, that in the vineyard he bore the king’s cup, &  pressed it with grapes full of excellent wine.)

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 1 (A–E), 2000–06, s.v. botiller, n.; botel3, n.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. buticularius, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 October 2025, s.v. boteler, n.(1).

Napier, Arthur S., ed. Iacob and Iosep, a Middle English Poem of the Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916, lines 254–57, 9. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 652. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2018, s.v. butler, n.

Photo credit: Warner Bros., 1933. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.