Other forms: buckets
A bucket is an open container with a handle, used for carrying water. A bucket of water, a plastic bucket, a bucket and spade.
The word is used loosely for any amount that size — a bucket of ice, buckets of rain — and it rained buckets is a common way of saying it poured. Note bucket list, meaning the things somebody wants to do before they die, which comes from kick the bucket and is now far commoner than the phrase it came from. And a drop in the bucket means a contribution too small to matter, which is also said as a drop in the ocean.
1nounbucketAn open container with a handle for carrying liquid.
“There is a bucket under the sink.”
2nounamountThe amount a bucket holds.
“It took four buckets to fill the paddling pool.”
3nounscoopThe scoop on a digger or a crane.
“The bucket took out half the wall in one go.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
bucket is a container.
Also accepted in games: pail
The word came through Anglo-Norman from a root meaning a belly or a hollow object, and the same Germanic root gives Dutch buik, a belly. A bucket is named for its shape, which is a thing with a cavity in it.
Middle English
boket
English, today
bucket
Built from
From Middle English boket. 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, 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.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA