Buck Naked and Butt Naked
By Maeve Maddox
A reader has two questions about the idiom “buck naked”:
1. When did people start saying, “butt naked” instead of “buck naked”?
2. What does “buck naked” mean, anyway?
buck naked, adjective: completely unclothed.
In Old English, the word that is now spelled buck referred to a male deer. Later, the word also came be applied to the male of other species. For example, buck is the term for the male of the following animals:
deer
goat
kangaroo
mouse
rabbit
rat
reindeer
squirrel
Not surprisingly, buck became a slang term for a male of the human species. The earliest OED citation for buck used to mean man or fellow is dated 1303.
In the eighteenth century, buck was popular slang for a man who attended plays and other fashionable social events to be seen and admired.
In Australia, buck was used to refer to male aborigines. In the United States, buck referred to both American Indians and men of African descent. Examples of this usage may be found in nineteenth-century entries in the US Congressional Record.
Although various explanations have been offered, no one can say with certainty how the word buck came to be attached to naked.
The earliest evidence of “buck naked” on the Ngram Viewer, which is based on printed sources, appears in 1914. “Butt naked” comes along in 1924, but doesn’t make much of a showing until 1980, when it begins to soar.
*http://www.dailywritingtips.com/buck-naked-and-butt-naked/
