buttload / butt ugly
6 July 2026
Buttload is a slang term meaning a great quantity of something. It’s a relatively recent term; it starts to appear in the late 1980s. The -load is self-explanatory, But why butt?
The butt comes from a slang use of that word as an intensifier. University of North Carolina Linguist Connie Eble’s files on campus slang record this sense, with the example of butt ugly, from 1988. And Pamela Munro’s 1989 dictionary of college slang, Slang U., has this entry:
butt very, truly, extremely, very much so, incredibly | I had to get up butt early this morning for my eight o’clock class!
And it also has this entry for a duplicative form of the intensifier:
butt-ass very | It’s butt-ass cold.
Butt ugly is used as a nickname for a character as early as 1983 in an episode of the television series Hill Street Blues. So it seems likely that this adverbial use of butt started with this term, meaning looking unattractive as a person's ass (although since many think asses are quite attractive, perhaps donkey?), and then the butt was applied in other contexts where the anatomical (or equine) context did not apply.
It is possible, albeit rather unlikely, that the adverbial butt comes from the sense of the noun referring to a large cask of wine or other liquids. This butt was used as an adverb meaning a large amount in the early nineteenth century. But it is not very plausible that college students in the 1980s would resurrect this archaic usage and incorporate into their slang.
Anyway, we see buttload in Richard Raynor’s 1988 novel Los Angeles Without a Map:
I’d never sell any of this stuff. But the Stetson that Dean wore in Giant, I guess that must be worth a buttload of money, $10,000 I guess.
And there is this Usenet post from 28 June 1989 critiquing the Alan Parsons Project album Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which used the stories of Edgar Allan Poe as a theme:
I do not like the fact that the symphonic material was broken up (the intro at the beginning of the disc, the remainder in the usual place. Everything's got buttloads of reverb and (hold your breath, here comes the big one) Ambience. Fuck ambience.
Sources:
Flander, Judy. “Tune in Tonight” (syndicated column). El Paso Herald-Post (Texas), 8 December 1983, B-10/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 14 June 2026, s.v. butt, n.1, butt, adv., shitload, n.
Munro, Pamela. Slang U. New York: Harmony, 1989, s.v., butt, butt-ass, 51. Archive.org.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2018, s.v. buttload, n., butt, n.6, butt, n.4; September 2011, s.v. shitload, n.
Raynor, Richard. Los Angeles Without a Map (1988). New York: Plume, 1990, 56. Archive.org.
Relph, John M. “Parsons’ Poe (was Re^2: CSN/ELP/YES).” Usenet: rec.music.cd, 28 June 1989.
Photo credit: Gillfoto, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
