butterbur
noun
butterbur is a noun meaning “Any of several Eurasian herbs, of the genus Petasites, having dense clusters of often purple flowers” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled B-U-T-T-E-R-B-U-R, and it appears about once in every 51 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of butterbur is butterburs.
What does butterbur mean?
noun
- 1
Any of several Eurasian herbs, of the genus Petasites, having dense clusters of often purple flowers.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce butterbur?
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-butterbur.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of butterbur
- butterburs plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is butterbur?
Butterbur appears about once in every 51 million words in written English, the 222,788th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Butterbur in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense herb:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does butterbur come from?
From butter + bur: its large leaves were once used to wrap butter.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).