The word 'butcher' can wear a few very different hats in English, and I love how context flips its meaning. In its most literal sense it's a noun for someone who slaughters animals and prepares meat — synonyms here include 'slaughterer', 'meatcutter', or more colloquially 'meat processor'. Historical or regional terms like 'slaughterman' show up in older texts, and the place of work is an 'abattoir' or simply a 'butcher's shop'. If you check 'Merriam-Webster' or 'Oxford English Dictionary', you'll see those occupational senses and related forms like 'butchery' or 'butchered'.
On the verb side, 'to butcher' commonly means to kill animals for meat (synonyms: 'slaughter', '
slay'), but it also carries a figurative sense: to do something very badly or to mangle. In that slang/figurative register, synonyms include 'botch', 'mangle', 'bungle', '
ruin', 'foul up', or 'mishandle'. So somebody might say, "You butchered that performance," meaning it was ruined, or "The meat was butchered yesterday," meaning it was prepared for sale.
There's also a darker, more charged usage where 'butcher' describes a violent killer — in that case synonyms would be 'murderer', 'executioner', 'slayer', or for mass killers 'mass murderer' or 'war criminal'. I tend to watch how tone and context steer which synonym fits best; the word can be practical, jokey, or terrifying depending on the sentence, and that flexibility is what makes it interesting to me.