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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

bucket.

A container made of rigid material, often with a handle, used to carry liquids or small items.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈbʌkɪt/General-American, Received-Pronunciation/ˈbʌk.ət//ˈbʊkɪt/Northern-England
  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.
  2. The amount held in this container.

    The horse drank a whole bucket of water.
  3. A large amount of liquid.

    in-plural · informal
    It rained buckets yesterday.
    I was so nervous that I sweated buckets.
  4. A great deal of anything.

    in-plural · informal
    My new suit cost me buckets.
    We had buckets of fun.
  5. A unit of measure equal to four gallons.

    UK · archaic
  6. The part of a piece of machinery that resembles a bucket (container).

  7. Someone who habitually uses crack cocaine.

    derogatory · slang
  8. An old vehicle that is not in good working order.

    slang
  9. The basket.

    informal
    The forward drove to the bucket.
  10. A field goal.

    informal
    We can't keep giving up easy buckets.
  11. A mechanism for avoiding the allocation of targets in cases of mismanagement.

  12. A storage space in a hash table for every item sharing a particular key.

  13. A turbine blade driven by hot gas or steam.

    uncommon
  14. A bucket bag.

  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. A helmet.

    humorous · slang
Where this word comes from

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.

verb/ˈbʌkɪt/General-American, Received-Pronunciation/ˈbʌk.ət//ˈbʊkɪt/Northern-England
  1. To place inside a bucket.

    transitive
  2. To draw or lift in, or as if in, buckets.

    transitive
    to bucket water
  3. To rain heavily.

    informal · intransitive
    It’s really bucketing down out there.
  4. To travel very quickly.

    informal · intransitive
    The boat is bucketing along.
  5. To ride (a horse) hard or mercilessly.

    transitive
  6. To criticize vehemently; to denigrate.

    Australia · slang · transitive
  7. To categorize (data) by splitting it into buckets, or groups of related items.

    transitive
  8. To engage in an illegal practice where a broker confirms a client's trade order without actually executing it on the free market.

    US · transitive
  9. To make, or cause to make (the recovery), with a certain hurried or unskillful forward swing of the body.

    UK · US · transitive
Where this word comes from

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.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.