Bucket

Pronunciation

• enPR: bûk'Ä­t, IPA: /ˈbÊŒkɪt/
• Rhymes: -ÊŒkɪt

Origin

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

Full definition of bucket

Noun

1. A container made of rigid material, often with a handle, used to carry liquids or small items.I need a bucket to carry the water from the well.
• 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room Chapter 1The 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. Part of a piece of machinery that resembles a bucket.
4. (slang) An old car that is not in good working order.
5. (basketball, informal) The basket.The forward drove to the bucket.
6. (basketball, informal) A field goal.''We can't keep giving up easy buckets.
7. (variation management) A mechanism for avoiding the allocation of targets in cases of mismanagement.
8. (computing) A storage space in a hash table for every item sharing a particular key.
9. (informal, chiefly plural) A large amount of liquid.It rained buckets yesterday.I was so nervous that I sweated buckets.

Synonyms

• container: pail
• piece of machinery: scoop, vane, blade
• old car: banger, jalopy, rustbucket

Derived terms

Verb

1. (transitive) To place inside a bucket.
2. (intransitive, informal) To rain heavily.
• It’s really bucketing down out there.
3. (intransitive, informal) To travel very quickly.
• The boat is bucketing along.
4. (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 the sorted buckets together is O(n).

Synonyms

• (rain heavily) chuck it down, piss down, rain cats and dogs
• (travel very quickly) hurtle, rocket, shoot, speed, whizz, book it