To butter someone up is to flatter them, usually because you want something. A widely shared explanation says the phrase comes from ancient India, where worshippers threw balls of ghee, clarified butter, at statues of the gods to win their favor.
The English record points somewhere else. English writers were calling smooth, flattering speech "butter" by 1618, usually paired with "oil," and the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest "butter up" dates to 1798. No reference we read connects any of it to India. CulinaryLore, which examined the temple story directly, found no historical documentation of the practice as the story describes it and no linguistic link to the English idiom. The phrase is an English metaphor about slipperiness.
What "butter someone up" means
The American Heritage Idioms Dictionary, as carried by Dictionary.com, defines it as "to praise or flatter someone excessively." The flattery has a purpose. You butter up a person before you ask for a favor, a raise or a signature.
- She spent the whole lunch buttering up the client before she mentioned the price increase.
- Don't try to butter me up. The answer is still no.
It is a phrasal verb, and the object can go in the middle or at the end: "butter up the boss" and "butter the boss up" are both fine. With a pronoun, the pronoun goes in the middle: "butter him up," never "butter up him."
| Register | Region | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|
| butter someone up | casual to neutral. Fine in conversation and informal work email; a little flippant for formal writing | both US and UK | current |
| buttering up (noun use) | casual | both US and UK | current |
The citation trail in English
Four dates, in order. Each is given with the reference that reports it, because we did not open the original books.
1618, J. Dyke, Two Treatises. CulinaryLore reports that the OED dates the sense of "butter" as flattering or ingratiating speech to 1618, and quotes Dyke: "Words…when rather words, as it were suppled with Oyle and Butter, should be vsed." The spelling is the original. Note the pairing. Butter does not stand alone here. It is one of two lubricants, and the other is oil.
1662, Thomas Brooks, The Crown and Glory of Christianity. Wordsmarts quotes this Puritan preacher on flatterers, who "oil their tongues and … butter their lips, so that by their smooth, soft speeches they may the more insinuate themselves into men's minds." Oil and butter again, and this time the sentence explains the image itself: the speech is smooth and soft, so it slides into the listener's mind. The book's text is held in the University of Michigan's Early English Books Online collection; we could not load the page, so the quotation is given as Wordsmarts gives it.
1737, The Universal Etymological English Dictionary. Wordsmarts quotes the entry: "to butter, signifies also, to cheat or defraud in a smooth or plausible manner." By now the word has a darker edge. Buttering is not just flattery but deception done smoothly.
1798, the first "butter up." Wordsmarts gives the OED's 1798 citation: "We must butter him up with kind looks and civil speeches until he signs the deed." Every element of the modern phrase is present: the target, the flattery, and the thing the flatterer wants. The references we read do not name the work it comes from, so we give only the year and the dictionary.
The shape of the trail is the point. The metaphor is English, it is Protestant and literary in its early uses, and it is always about making speech slippery. The word "up," which turns a sense into a phrasal verb, arrives late, as it does in many English verbs of finishing or completing an action, and nothing in any of the four citations mentions a temple, a statue or India.
The temple story, and why it fails
The story, as it circulates on idiom sites and in trivia columns, is that worshippers in ancient India threw or spread balls of ghee on statues of deities to ask for good fortune, crops or health, and that English picked up the image of "buttering up" a powerful figure.
It falls apart on three tests.
No one cites it. None of the pages that tell the story gives a source for the custom as described, or for any route by which it reached English. CulinaryLore went looking and reports finding neither documentation of the practice nor a linguistic connection.
The English record does not need it. The phrase has a complete native history: butter as smooth speech in 1618, butter and oil on the flatterer's lips in 1662, butter as smooth cheating in 1737, "butter up" in 1798. A borrowed origin would have to explain why none of those writers mentions India, and why the image in every early citation is slipperiness rather than offering.
It borrows something real. Ghee does have an important place in Hindu worship, and CulinaryLore notes associations that are genuine, such as the god Krishna's nickname makhan chor, the "butter thief." That is exactly what makes the story persuasive. A real religious use of butter is attached to an English idiom that grew up separately, and the true half lends credibility to the false connection.
The story also has the classic shape of an invented origin that tracing a phrase to its earliest citation is designed to catch: an ancient, distant practice, a single vivid image, and no dates. It is the same shape as the Greek bean-voting explanation for "spill the beans", which fails because the English phrase turns up more than two thousand years after the custom it supposedly describes. And like the suicide story told about "kick the bucket", it survives because it is easy to picture, not because anyone has documented it.
Why oil and butter, and not bread
A second explanation, less exotic, says the phrase comes from buttering bread: you spread something pleasant on a person the way you spread butter on toast. It is harmless, and it is at least English. But the early citations do not support it either. Dyke and Brooks both pair butter with oil, and oil is not spread on bread. What oil and butter share is that they make things slide. Brooks says so in as many words: the speech is "smooth, soft," and it lets the flatterer "insinuate" himself.
That is the useful thing about reading the citations rather than the stories. The early writers tell you what they meant by the image, and it is lubrication, not flavor. English has kept the same idea in other flattery words, and "oily" is still an insult for a smooth talker.
Food idioms often hide an older and less obvious sense under a familiar one, which is also what happened to the "proof" in the 1605 sentence behind "the proof is in the pudding". The kitchen is in the phrase; the meaning is somewhere else.
Using the phrase today
"Butter up" is always a little knowing. It implies the flattery is strategic, so saying you buttered someone up is admitting a motive. That makes it good for self-deprecating stories ("I buttered up the landlord with cookies") and slightly pointed when said about someone else.
Near relatives, each with its own shade:
- Sweet-talk: persuasion by charm, often romantic or coaxing.
- Suck up to: flattery of a superior, more contemptuous and more informal.
- Soft-soap: smooth flattery, now somewhat dated.
- Flatter: the neutral word, and the safest choice in formal writing.
What is genuinely unresolved
Whether earlier English uses exist is unknown. 1618 is the earliest date the references we read give for the flattery sense, and 1798 for "butter up."
The 1798 source is unnamed here. We could not identify the work the OED quotes.
None of the early books was opened. Every quotation on this page comes through a named reference, and a reader who wants the primary text should start with the Early English Books Online record for Brooks.
Frequently asked questions
Where does "butter someone up" come from?
From an English metaphor for smooth, slippery speech. The OED, as quoted by CulinaryLore, dates the flattery sense of "butter" to 1618, when J. Dyke wrote of words "suppled with Oyle and Butter." Thomas Brooks in 1662 described flatterers who "oil their tongues" and "butter their lips." The OED's first "butter him up" is from 1798.
Is the Indian temple story true?
No reference supports it. CulinaryLore found no historical documentation of worshippers throwing ghee at statues as the story describes, and no linguistic link to the English phrase. The English record explains the idiom on its own, with no mention of India.
When was "butter up" first used?
The earliest citation we found is 1798, quoted from the OED by Wordsmarts: "We must butter him up with kind looks and civil speeches until he signs the deed."
Is "butter someone up" rude?
Not rude, but knowing. It suggests the flattery has a motive, so it is fine in casual conversation and informal work messages and slightly too flippant for formal writing.
