Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I first heard the expression shedloads, meaning a large quantity, e.g. shedloads of money. This makes some sense as a shed full of something would be a large quantity. I’ve always thought shitloads must be an eggcorn of it, as it seems to make no sense. But perhaps shit is being used as an intensifier as in “shit hot”. Could shedloads be a sanitised version of the original?
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I have always thought “shit loads” or “butt loads,” as in a fully loaded diaper from a sick kid. Still might be an eggcorn, though.
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I think ‘shedloads’ is the eggcorn. It’s the sanitised version. Someone in our office says it all the time and I always want to shout ‘SHITloads, it’s SHITloads!!’
‘Shedloads’ doesn’t really seem to fit. I mean, since when is a shed a unit of measurement?
‘Shit’ is a great all-purpose intensifier, like ‘fuck’. What about fuckloads?
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Shedloads is very common in the UK, whereas shitloads is not. Of course, sheds are also very common in the UK, on our beloved allotments (there’s even a photo collection of men and their sheds. A Google UK search turns up 23,000 results from UK pages, out of 58,000 total references; that’s 1,000 more hits than for shitloads in the UK.
It very well might be a sanitisation of shitloads originally, but it seems to have a life of its own now (it’s even in a book title: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dad-Stuff-Shedl … 0743275748 )
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I don’t think ‘shed’ refers to garden huts at all; it seems to be an unlikely choice of receptacle for a lot of something. My pet theory is that it’s some sort of back-formation from a common phrase on UK radio travel bulletins – “a lorry has shed its load…a shed load of turnips…”
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In New Zealand one often hears ‘shitloads’ but never ‘shedloads’. In fact i’d never heard of it until I saw tihs disucssion.
A shitload is used here to mean far more than just a load, eg There was a shitload of money spent on the new furniture. In common usage of shitloads, shit acts as an intensifier. It has nothing to do with excerement.
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