booty

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   valuable goods seized as plunder; loot

   The pirates divided the booty on the beach.

Simplified etymology

Booty in the sense “plunder” originally had the core meaning “to distribute,” reflected in victors dividing spoils taken from an enemy. The unrelated modern American word was first recorded for sexual intercourse in the early 20th century, probably as a development of the more usual sense “buttocks.” That sense probably arose as an alteration of mid-19th-century botty, itself an alteration of the Old English word bottom, which has been used for the buttocks since the late 18th century. Bootylicious has been used of a sexy woman since 1994 and was popularized by Destiny’s Child’s 2001 single.

From Middle English botye, from Old French butin ('booty'), of Germanic origin, from Middle Low German bute, buten ('exchange, distribution, plunder'). Unrelated to the slang sense of buttocks.

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External links

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• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary