Barrels, gallons, liters, and of course, buttloads

By BEN OLSON/for The Herald  —  “ We caught a buttload of fish at the lake today.” I’ve heard that descriptive term used to quantify a large amount of anything with which the speaker was impressed. Great orators like Bart or Beavis use terms such as “buttload.” Today, at this late point in my life, my son has pointed out to me that it’s a real word.

A buttload is an old British measurement for one half of a tun. A tun is 216 Imperial gallons, and weighs, you guessed it, about 2000 lbs. It stands to reason, then, that a buttload is approximately 108 Imperial gallons, and the only things truly measured in buttloads are intoxicating beverages- beer, wine or spirits. 

Bots, bottes, and barrels

Where did the word come from? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “butt” comes from the old French word “bot” which translates to barrel. Gizmodo claims that it came from a medieval French and Italian word, “botte”, which means boot, but eventually came to mean barrel, as well. How big a gallon is has changed over the years, and still is different, depending on what your gallon measures and where in the world you happen to be.

In QEI’s time…

In Queen Elizabeth the First’s time (1533 to 1603), an ale gallon was 4.621 liters, or as they say in England, “litres”. The Winchester gallon, or corn gallon was decreed by the English Parliament in 1696 to be the standard of dry measure. After the Revolutionary War, we here in the U.S. decided to call that same amount, 4.405 liters or 268.8 cubic inches, the U.S. dry gallon.  The wine gallon was adopted in 1706, during Queen Anne’s reign. It was 3.785 liters, or 128 ounces and it is that with which we in the U.S. measure our milk and gasoline. The British made the Imperial gallon their standard of liquid measure in 1834. At 4.546 liters or 160 ounces, it is 20% larger than the U.S. gallon. 

I’ve been fortunate enough to take some extended drives through Canada over the years. They make it easy for us Americans by driving on the same side of the road as we do. Speed limits are simple enough to figure out. When I start buying liters of gas with Canadian dollars, though, I am less than sure just how much I’m paying. Similar to many places in America, every station in town is charging the exact same amount per liter, so you pull into one that you can imagine to have the cleanest restrooms and pay the amount that gets rung up on the pump. Why they sell gas by the liter rather than the Imperial gallon is a mystery that must be solved in another column.

How’s your math skills?

As I said earlier, a tun is 216 Imperial gallons and a butt is half of that. A puncheon or tertian is ⅓, a hoghead is ¼, a tierce is ⅙, a barrel is ⅛, and a rundlet is 1/14. As a test of your math skills, please convert these to U.S. gallons. Next we’ll be converting footpounds per fortnight to candlepower per light year. I’m sure there’s a simple formula. In the meantime, I’ll be picking up a Nebuchadnezzar of Liebfraumilch for my next card party.