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bucket

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: bücket and Bucket

English

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A plastic bucket
An excavator bucket

Etymology

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    From Middle English buket, boket, partly from Old English bucc ("bucket, pitcher"; mod. dialectal buck), equivalent to bouk +‎ -et; and partly from Anglo-Norman buket, buquet (“tub; pail”) (compare Norman boutchet, Norman bouquet), diminutive of Old French buc (“abdomen; object with a cavity”), from Vulgar Latin *būcus (compare Occitan and Catalan buc, Italian buco, buca (“hole, gap”)), from Frankish *būk (“belly, stomach”). Both the Old English and Frankish terms derive from Proto-Germanic *būkaz (“belly, stomach”). More at bouk.

    Pronunciation

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    Noun

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    bucket (plural buckets)

    1. A container made of rigid material, often with a handle, used to carry liquids or small items.
      Synonym: pail
      I need a bucket to carry the water from the well.
      • 1922 October 26, Virginia Woolf, chapter 1, in Jacob’s Room, Richmond, London: […] Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished London: The Hogarth Press, 1960, →OCLC:
        The crab was cool and very light. But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an enormous man and woman.
    2. The amount held in this container.
      The horse drank a whole bucket of water.
    3. (informal, chiefly in the plural) A large amount of liquid.
      It rained buckets yesterday.
      I was so nervous that I sweated buckets.
    4. (informal, chiefly in the plural) A great deal of anything.
      My new suit cost me buckets.
      We had buckets of fun.
    5. (UK, archaic) A unit of measure equal to four gallons.
    6. The part of a piece of machinery that resembles a bucket (container).
      Synonyms: scoop, vane, blade
    7. (MTE, slang, derogatory) Someone who habitually uses crack cocaine.
      (Can we add an example for this sense?)
    8. (slang) An old vehicle that is not in good working order.
      Synonyms: banger, beater, hooptie, jalopy, wreck, crock, shitbox, rustbucket; see also Thesaurus:old car
    9. (basketball, informal) The basket.
      The forward drove to the bucket.
    10. (basketball, informal) A field goal.
      We can't keep giving up easy buckets.
      • 2019 February 25, Brett Dawson, Fred Katz, “How power forward Markieff Morris might fit in with the Thunder”, in The Athletic‎[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 24 January 2025:
        [Markieff] Morris isn’t quite the post-up threat that [Enes] Kanter is, and he can play both the 4 spot and 5 spot instead of just center, like Kanter. He is capable of playing a similar way, backing defenders down in the post. He prefers getting his buckets there with a bevy of fade-aways and jumpers. He’s a heat checker. And he can get hot on the block.
    11. (variation management) A mechanism for avoiding the allocation of targets in cases of mismanagement.
    12. (computing) A storage space in a hash table for every item sharing a particular key.
    13. (aviation, mechanical engineering, uncommon) A turbine blade driven by hot gas or steam.
    14. A bucket bag.
      • 1989, Susan Ludwig, Janice Steinberg, Petite Style, page 46:
        Avoid bulky styles such as duffle sacks, buckets, doctors' satchels, and hobos.
    15. The leather socket for holding the whip when driving, or for the carbine or lance when mounted.
    16. The pitcher in certain orchids.
    17. (slang, humorous) A helmet.

    Derived terms

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    Descendants

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    • Tok Pisin: baket
    • → Farefare: bɔgtɛ
    • → Japanese: バケツ (baketsu)
    • → Māori: pākete
    • → Pohnpeian: pekid
    • → Samoan: pakete

    Translations

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    See also

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    Verb

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    bucket (third-person singular simple present buckets, present participle bucketing, simple past and past participle bucketed)

    1. (transitive) To pour water from a bucket on to (something or someone); to drench; to douse (a fire etc.) with water from a bucket. [from 17th c.]
    2. (transitive) To carry (something) in a bucket. [from 17th c.]
    3. (transitive) To pour (water) from a bucket. [from 19th c.]
      • 2016, Chol-wdwuok, Angels in Swollen Crises, page 34:
        Dad and other displaced males dug, and amended the dyke, and women bucketed water over it.
    4. (transitive, now rare) To ride (a horse) hard or mercilessly. [from 19th c.]
    5. (intransitive, informal) To move in an uncontrolled or irregular manner, especially fast. [from 19th c.]
      The boat is bucketing along.
    6. (transitive) To drive (a vehicle, person) roughly or chaotically. [from 19th c.]
      • 1916, John Buchan, Greenmantle, London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
        ‘I'm going to break all the rules and bucket this car for what she's worth.’
      • 1988, C. MacLeod, The Silver Ghost, page 135:
        ‘Is there any chance he may still be alive?’ Max asked as the cart bucketed them back down the path.
    7. (intransitive, informal) To rain heavily; to pour down as though in bucketfuls. Often with down. [from 19th c.]
      It’s really bucketing down out there.
    8. (ambitransitive, rowing) To make, or cause to make (the recovery), with a certain hurried or unskillful forward swing of the body. [from 19th c.]
    9. (transitive, finance) Deliberately to fail to execute (an order, sale, trade etc.) with the aim of making a profit from the losses incurred by the customer. [from 19th c.]
      • 1963, United States. Securities and Exchange Commission, Annual Report of the Securities and Exchange Commission, page 138:
        In United States v. Ficken (N.D. Ohio) the defendant was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment after pleading guilty to charges of converting clients' funds by "bucketing" their orders.
    10. (transitive, Australia, slang) To criticize vehemently; to denigrate. [from 20th c.]
    11. (computing, transitive) To categorize (data) by splitting it into buckets, or groups of related items.
      • 2002, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Masayuki Numao, Rüdiger Reischuk, Algorithmic Learning Theory: 13th International Conference, page 352:
        These candidates are then bucketed into a discretized version of the space of all possible lines.
      • 2008, Hari Mohan Pandey, Design Analysis and Algorithm, page 136:
        Thus, sorting each bucket takes O(1) times. The total effort of bucketing, sorting buckets, and concotenating[sic] the sorted buckets together is O(n).

    Synonyms

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    Derived terms

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    Translations

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    References

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    Further reading

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    Scots

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    Etymology

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    As English bucket.

    Pronunciation

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    Noun

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    bucket (plural buckets)

    1. rubbish bin

    References

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    “bucket, n..”, in The Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, 2004–present, →OCLC.

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