bucket

Etymology

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.

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.
   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. 1922, Virginia Woolf, chapter 1, in Jacob's Room
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. Part of a piece of machinery that resembles a bucket (container).
7. (MTE, slang) an insult term used in Toronto to refer to someone who habitually uses crack cocaine.
8. (slang) An old vehicle that is not in good working order.
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.
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.
    Avoid bulky styles such as duffle sacks, buckets, doctors' satchels, and hobos. 1989, Susan Ludwig, Janice Steinberg, Petite Style, page 46
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.

verb

1. (transitive) To place inside a bucket.
2. (transitive) To draw or lift in, or as if in, buckets.
   to bucket water
3. (intransitive, informal) To rain heavily.
   It’s really bucketing down out there.
4. (intransitive, informal) To travel very quickly.
   The boat is bucketing along.
5. (transitive) To ride (a horse) hard or mercilessly.
6. (transitive, Australia, slang) To criticize vehemently; to denigrate.
7. (computing, transitive) To categorize (data) by splitting it into buckets, or groups of related items.
   These candidates are then bucketed into a discretized version of the space of all possible lines. 2002, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Masayuki Numao, Rüdiger Reischuk, Algorithmic Learning Theory: 13th International Conference, page 352
   Thus, sorting each bucket takes O(1) times. The total effort of bucketing, sorting buckets, and concotenating the sorted buckets together is O(n). 2008, Hari Mohan Pandey, Design Analysis and Algorithm, page 136
8. (transitive, UK, US, rowing) To make, or cause to make (the recovery), with a certain hurried or unskillful forward swing of the body.