Buttload
noun, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A regional English measure of capacity of a heavy cart (a butt), containing 6 seams, or 48 bushels, equivalent to 384 gallons. UK, West-Country, obsolete
"BUTT LOAD: about six seams."
- 2 A large amount carried in a butt. British, New-England, Southern-US, dated
"We spent all day Sunday and picked up a buttload of pecans."
- 3 Any large but unspecific amount. broadly, mildly, slang, vulgar
"You can collect a metric buttload of data about user activity on your site without too much effort."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The farmers near the fishing towns in the same district [Cornwall] likewise buy the refuse of bruised and small pilchards, which are rejected as unfit for curing or the market, and are called caff, four cart-loads of twelve bushels each being considered as the quantity proper for an acre. […] The butt-load formerly cost about 9s. or 10s. but they now fetch 15s. or 20s. the load."
Etymology
From butt + load. Butt in this context may be possibly one or both of: * butt (“large wooden cask”) (Etymology 3) * butt (“two-wheeled cart”) (Etymology 5) Alternatively, the term may either be a corruption of English boatload or have been influenced by that term (except for the specific, West Country dialect sense). All senses above also synchronically reanalyzed as buttocksful.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.