kick the bucket
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Related to kick the bucket: bucket list
kick the bucket
slang
1. To die. If they invent a hoverboard before I kick the bucket, I'm definitely going to try it, no matter how old I am. Any plant under my care kicks the bucket in about a week.
2. To stop working completely; to break down. I had this truck for nearly 30 years before it finally kicked the bucket. Is the printer jammed again, or has it kicked the bucket this time?
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
kick the bucket
Die, as in All of my goldfish kicked the bucket while we were on vacation. This moderately impolite usage has a disputed origin. Some say it refers to committing suicide by hanging, in which one stands on a bucket, fastens a rope around one's neck, and kicks the bucket away. A more likely origin is the use of bucket in the sense of "a beam from which something may be suspended" because pigs were suspended by their heels from such beams after being slaughtered, the term kick the bucket came to mean "to die." [Colloquial; late 1700s]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 2003, 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
kick the bucket
INFORMALIf someone kicks the bucket, they die. The doctor said the old girl is about to kick the bucket — got some sort of kidney infection. All the money goes to her when the old man kicks the bucket. Note: This expression is used in a humorous way. Note: The origins of this expression are uncertain. It may refer to someone committing suicide by standing on a bucket, tying a rope around their neck, then kicking the bucket away.
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2012
kick the bucket
die. informalThe bucket in this phrase may be a pail on which a person committing suicide might stand, kicking it away before they hanged themselves. Another suggestion is that it refers to a beam on which something can be hung up; in Norfolk dialect the beam from which a slaughtered pig was suspended by its heels could be referred to as a bucket .
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017
ˌkick the ˈbucket
(British English, informal or humorous) die: He got married for the first time when he was 75 and a week later he kicked the bucket.This idiom refers to the killing of animals for food. They were hung from a wooden frame (the bucket), which they would kick as they were dying.Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017
kick the bucket
tv. to die. I’m too young to kick the bucket!
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
kick the bucket
Slang To die.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
kick the bucket, to
To die. This expression, which comes from eighteenth-century Britain, has several explanations. One is that the bucket referred to is the East Anglian word for a beam on which a pig is hung by its feet to be slaughtered and which it kicks against in its death struggles. Another theorizes that a person committing suicide by hanging may stand on an overturned bucket to fasten the rope and then kick it away. The term was loosely used for anyone dying by any means by 1785, when it was so defined in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer Copyright © 2013 by Christine Ammer