Why Do We Say “Up the Wazoo”?

When a person has problems that threaten to overwhelm them, it is an unhelpful friend or observer who says they have issues “up the wazoo.” Or they might use the alternative phrase out the wazoo. In either case, wazoo is functioning as a slang term for the butt, and the poor soul who’s being talked about has a dilemma or some kind of surplus that is either up their posterior or coming out of it.

Crass? Certainly. But also quite descriptive. So where did this charming colloquialism come from?

Let’s start with wazoo. According to the Oxford English Dictionary—which remains an authority on words both pleasant and profane—wazoo’s origins are hard to pin down. The word might come from the French word oiseau, or “bird,” via Louisiana Creole. Another possibility is that it stemmed from the word razoo meaning “raspberry,” but not in the edible sense: Razoo was late-1800s slang for giving someone raspberries, or showing them contempt.

Another theory is that wazoo may be related to kazoo and its variant, gazoo, which both entered the lexicon in the 19th century to describe the buzzing instrument. In the 1960s, all three words gained traction as slang for the butt or anus, perhaps because it, too, also makes unpleasant noise. Wazoo in particular first saw print in this context in 1961, when a University of California, Berkeley, campus humor newspaper suggested readers “run it up yer ol’ wazoo.” And in Francis Pollini’s 1965 novel Glover, a character mentions a place featuring “Blokes, Blokes, up the goddamn gazoo and out.”

Pollini was using the phrase like we use up the wazoo today—implying (usually unpleasant) excess or abundance. It’s unclear when exactly people started invoking wazoo itself in the same way, but it happened at least as early as 1978: That year, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser observed that Wally Amos (of Famous Amos cookie fame) was “up his wazoo in kazoos” as a result of handing them out at a baseball game.

By the 1980s, up the wazoo in the posterior sense had begun to proliferate across published works. The OED’s first citation appeared in New York’s Syracuse Herald-Journal in 1981 (“There comes a time in performing when you just do it. You can have theory up the wazoo”), while Green’s Dictionary of Slang cites the 1983 book Gardens of Stone: “I got paperwork up the wazoo.”

Eventually, up the wazoo and out the wazoo eclipsed their kazoo and gazoo counterparts—and even other wazoo phrases, including pain in the wazoo. Per the OED, both of the former phrases mean “in great quantities, in abundance, to excess,” but Green’s has a slightly different definitions: Out the wazoo simply means “to excess,” while up the wazoo has a more negative connotation, meaning “full up, as much as one can handle, to excess; all over the place.” So if one has an issue up the wazoo, it means the problem has gotten out of hand. If a situation has been described as going out the wazoo, then the excess isn’t necessarily a problem. One could have money out the wazoo with no complaints. Bills up the wazoo, however, would be a different story.

In all instances, a writer or speaker is able to communicate a crude meaning without running afoul of manners or editorial guidelines, which may help explain how the word wazoo caught on in the first place. Even The Wall Street Journal was an early champion: One 1971 article stated that golf “is quite safe, the greatest risk being the possibility of a long drive plunking some poor fellow in the wazoo.”

But wazoo has not been the sole purview of the anus. According to Green’s, wazoo was used in print as a euphemism for the vagina as early as 1962. For some, wazoo is simply synonymous with an orifice, and apparently there was a time when any one of them would do.

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