Butt Load

Buttload (or butt load) sounds like it’s a perverse version of boatload, right? You want to correct the fifth grader who’s making a crass joke, and you want to point out that “boat load” is actually correct, and maybe that fifth grader should go watch some Beavis and Butthead in order to learn some better jokes involving perversions.

It turns out that a butt load is an actual unit of measure recognized for centuries in medieval and early modern England.

A butt was a term meaning a large barrel or cask like those used to store beer or wine. No, seriously!

Butt and bottle share a root word, at least the way butt is being used here. If you know the word arrived in English from the French language and you know a tiny bit of French, you can probably see how that happened.

A bot or a botte was a sealed container like a barrel in Old French, having come over from Late Latin as buttis. Over time, the butt variation came to mean the very large version of this, and the word bottle came to mean the smaller version.

So, there you have it: a butt load was an actual standard unit of measurement for centuries, and it was a very important measurement to butt. Er, to boot.

Every time you hear this oddly common cultural touchstone, please remember that we’re talking about a very specific measure—126 US gallons, or around 480 liters of fluid.

There’s at least one measure that’s used in a similar manner today as the buttload was back then: the barrel of oil. In the same way that oil was an incredibly important and valuable fluid that’s widely traded worldwide, so were buttloads of ale, wine, or spirits.