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How much wood would/could a woodchuck chuck is an American English-language tongue-twister. The woodchuck from the Algonquian word, "wejack" is a kind of marmot regionally called a groundhog. The complete beginning of the tongue twister usually goes, "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" The tongue-twister relies primarily on alliteration to achieve its effects, with five "w" sounds interspersed among five "ch" sounds.
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Answers
A traditional, if nonsensical, "response" to the question is: "A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood".
A 1957 Associated Press piece refers to the question as "a riddle which beats the Sphinx, since it's still unanswered". A more concrete answer was published by the Associated Press in 1988, which reported that a New York fish and wildlife technician named Richard Thomas had calculated the volume of dirt in a typical 25–30-foot (7.6–9.1 m) long woodchuck burrow, and had determined that if the woodchuck had moved an equivalent volume of wood, it could move "about 700 pounds (320 kg) on a good day, with the wind at his back". Another study, which considered "chuck" to be the opposite of upchucking, determined that a woodchuck could ingest 361.9237001 cubic centimetres (22.08593926 cu in) of wood per day.
Another proposed response comes from the parody-filled video game Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, where the protagonist asks a carpenter the question and gets the response: "A woodchuck would chuck no amount of wood since a woodchuck can't chuck wood."
Origin
The origin of the phrase is from a 1902 song, "The Woodchuck Song", written by Robert Hobart Davis for Fay Templeton in the musical, The Runaways. the lyrics became better known in a 1904 version of the song written by Theodore Morse, with a chorus of "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?", which was recorded by Ragtime Roberts, in 1904.
The tongue-twister is documented as "folklore" in 1972 at Farmington, Michigan. It is used in the title of Werner Herzog's 1976 film How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck a documentation of the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship in New Holland, Pennsylvania.