butterfly

For a while I had myself convinced that butterfly had something to do with “flutter by,” as if the name came from a convenient twist of the descriptive phrase. The AHD states that the Middle English butterflye came from the Old English butorfleoge. The OED suggests comparing the Old English word (also spelled buttorfleoge, with two t’s) with the Dutch botervlieg, earlier botervlieghe. So what does the pretty bug have to do with butter? As the OED explains, “The reason of the name is unknown.” It references, however, a Dutch synonym boterschijte, “which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement.” This answer would be much less poetic and romantic than our idealized butterflies. To offer this word a saving grace, I turned back to the AHD definition: “any of various insdects of the order Lepidoptera.” I decided to look up Lepidoptera in the OED, and found that the name of the order is modern Latin, from the Greek λεπιδο- (lepido-, combining form of λεπις, “scale”) and pteron (πτέρον, “wing,” like in pterodactyl!). It seems as though the butterfly suffers from a less than flattering etymological history.