Yes, sort of. There really was an old English unit called a butt, a large cask of wine holding roughly 477 litres. But “buttload” itself is mostly slang, and its link to that cask is less certain than the internet usually claims.
We have plenty of colourful ways to say “a lot”: a tonne of, a bucket load of, oodles, heaps. Almost none of them are real measurements. When I first heard buttload was the exception, I assumed it was a joke. The real history turned out to be messier, which somehow makes the word even better.
Meet the butt
A butt was both a large cask and a unit of liquid capacity. For wine, the traditional figure was 126 wine gallons, or about 477 litres, as Wikipedia’s article on the unit explains. It was also known as a pipe, and it was half a tun, two hogsheads or four barrels. Filled with water, the liquid alone would weigh about 477 kilograms, so a full butt of wine weighed close to half a tonne before you even counted the timber.
The butt was one rung on a whole ladder of cask sizes that wine merchants once used every day.
| Cask | Wine gallons | Litres (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Tun | 252 | 954 |
| Butt or pipe | 126 | 477 |
| Puncheon | 84 | 318 |
| Hogshead | 63 | 238 |
| Tierce | 42 | 159 |
| Barrel | 31.5 | 119 |
| Rundlet | 18 | 68 |
Figures from Wikipedia’s table of English wine cask units.
These were not modern, precisely standardised measures. Capacities varied with the period, the product and local practice, and the Oxford English Dictionary, as Wikipedia notes, warns that the standards were not always precisely adhered to. So 477 litres is a useful reference figure, not a promise about every butt ever made.
Wine and beer had different butts
To make things more confusing, beer had its own system. In the English brewery cask units, a beer butt was half a beer tun or two hogsheads, about 491 litres, or 108 imperial gallons. So even if “a buttload” meant exactly one butt, you would still need to ask: a wine butt or a beer butt?
Butt is a unit, buttload is (mostly) slang
This is where the popular story needs correcting. The butt is a historical unit. Buttload, in modern English, is generally slang: Wiktionary describes it as a mildly vulgar term for any large but unspecific amount, as in a “buttload of work”.
There is a fascinating complication, though. In the West Country of England, a butt-load really was a measure, just not of wine. A butt there was a heavy two-wheeled cart, and Wiktionary quotes the agricultural writer William Marshall, who in 1796 recorded a West Devonshire “butt load” as about six seams, later given as 48 bushels or 384 gallons. Cornish farmers in the early 1800s bought manure and fish waste by the butt-load. So a buttload genuinely was a unit of sorts, but of the cart, not necessarily the wine cask that modern internet explanations point to.
Where the word came from
The cask sense of butt has nothing to do with anyone’s backside. It comes from the medieval French and Italian word for a cask, and in Italy, as Boing Boing notes, botte is still used for a wine cask today. It was well established in English by Shakespeare’s time. In The Tempest, the drunken butler Stephano boasts that he escaped the shipwreck “upon a butt of sack”, a cask of sherry-style wine the sailors had heaved overboard.
Whether modern slang “buttload” grew out of that cask is a different question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows for sure. Wiktionary gives several possibilities: butt as the cask, butt as the West Country cart, or a corruption of “boatload” or something influenced by it. The obvious explanation, a load the size of a butt, just as a boatload is what a boat carries, is plausible but cannot be proven. What we can say is that the casks and the cartloads came centuries before the slang.
Butts are still around
The butt has disappeared as an official measure, but not as a cask. Whisky makers still use sherry butts, long and slender casks holding roughly 105 to 110 imperial gallons, according to Difford’s Guide as cited by Boing Boing. One of the old cask names is even linked to a much heavier word: the tun is etymologically related to the word ton, as Wikipedia’s article on the tun explains, and a full tun of wine weighed roughly a ton. And another cask lives on in the oil industry, where the barrel of crude is still 42 US gallons, the size of the old tierce.
So, is a buttload a real unit of measurement? The butt certainly was, at about 477 litres of wine or 491 litres of beer. The West Country butt-load was too, as a cartload. Today’s buttload is just slang for “a lot”, with a family history nobody can fully untangle. Next time someone says they have a buttload of work, you can tell them the word has a genuine measurement story behind it; just do not try to fit their workload into a 477-litre barrel. If you enjoy strange journeys through the history of words, you might also like my look at the words Shakespeare supposedly invented or how the word orange travelled into English.