slaughterer
(ˈslɔːtərə(r))
[f. slaughter v.]
1. One who slaughters or kills.
| 1591 Shakes. 1 Hen. VI, ii. v. 109 Thou do'st then wrong me, as y{supt} slaughterer doth, Which giueth many Wounds, when one will kill. c 1611 Chapman Iliad xiii. 593 At his slaughterers Incensed Paris spent a lance. 1679 C. Ness Antichrist 191 Nations all that time warring against those slaughterers. 1864 Burton Scot Abroad II. i. 98 The slaughterers of St. Bartholomew. |
b. A powerful fighter or boxer.
| 1896 C. Doyle R. Stone xvii, I've seen Jack Harrison fight five times, and I never yet saw him have the worse of it. He's a slaughterer, and so I tell you. |
2. A killer of animals; a butcher.
| 1648 Hexham ii, Een slager der beesten, a Slaughterer. 1668 R. Steele Husbandman's Calling vi. (1672) 161 The Lamb looks cheerfully on the slaughterer. 1795 Southey Joan of Arc iv. 352, I saw the cattle start..And with a piteous moaning vainly seek To fly the coming slaughterers. 1828 Maitland Let. to Simeon 28 One perhaps has been a singer in the synagogue;..a third, a slaughterer. 1868 Standard 15 Dec. 6 The [Jewish] slaughterer is not a butcher in the accepted sense of the term. 1881 Nation (N.Y.) XXXII. 428 A tremendous slaughterer of the brute creation. |
3. slang. A dealer who buys from small makers at extremely low prices.
| 1851 Mayhew Lond. Lab. I. 333 The ‘slaughterers’..buy at ‘starvation prices’.., the artificer being often kept waiting for hours. Ibid. II. 303 The slaughterer cared only to have them viewly and cheap. |