To bring any two flat‐ended surfaces into contact without overlapping, as in a butt joint.
The Late Latin buttis, meaning cask, is the source of the English word butt, the name of a wine cask ranging in size from 108 to 140 gallons, large enough that Edward IV was able to execute his brother Clarence by drowning him in a butt of malmsey wine. The word first entered English in the middle of the fifteenth century. Earlier than this, in the late fourteenth century, buttis had already given rise to another English word: buttery, a storeroom whose name was modelled upon the French word bouteillerie, meaning bottle. Butteries, in fact, originally contained no butter, no milk fats whatsoever, only bottles and bottles of wine tended by the household’s butler. Eventually, however, confusion with the unrelated word butter caused the meaning of buttery to expand, so that by the middle of the seventeenth century butteries had come to house almost any kind of provision.
To join the ends of two objects together.