wastebasket

nounA2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans spoken

Other forms: wastebaskets

A wastebasket is the small bin beside a desk for paper you are throwing away. Not the kitchen bin — the one that only ever holds envelopes and drafts.

It is chiefly American; British English says wastepaper basket, or more often just the bin. The word carries the same figurative use as its cousins — a proposal that goes straight in the wastebasket has been rejected without discussion. In biology and library work a wastebasket category is one that holds everything nobody could classify properly, which is a nicely exact insult for a piece of filing.

Definitions of wastebasket

1nounwastebasketA small container for paper rubbish, usually kept by a desk.A2
“He crumpled the letter and dropped it in the wastebasket.”
synonyms: wastepaper basket

Where it comes from

From waste + basket.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 9 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

wastebasket in the wild

In the 19th century, the Mesozoa were a wastebasket taxon for multicellular organisms which lacked the invaginating gastrula which was thought to define the Metazoa.
Mesozoa
Formerly, many Old World species were placed here, as Mabuya was a kind of "wastebasket taxon".
Mabuya
The genus was previously very large (a wastebasket taxon), including cichlids from North America, including Central America, and South America.
Cichlasoma
During the 18th and 19th centuries, all such shells discovered were given the "catch-all" name Orthoceras, thus creating a wastebasket taxon.
Orthocone
The name of a wastebasket taxon may in some cases be retained as the designation of an evolutionary grade, however.
Wastebasket taxon

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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