/ˈkɪk ðə ˈbʌkɪt/
English idiom, colloquial. To die (said in a casual, joking way).
Draft Not yet checked by a native English speaker.
How do people use Kick the bucket
?
Colloquial and a bit cheeky, used when the speaker wants to keep death light: “when I kick the bucket”, “the old guy finally kicked the bucket”. It also works for machines that die for good (“my laptop kicked the bucket”). It’s mostly used in the past tense or about the future.
Kick the bucket
in real sentences
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He kicked the bucket yesterday.
Tatoeba, sentence by morbrorper, CC BY 2.0 FR
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Tom has just kicked the bucket.
Where does Kick the bucket
come from?
Nobody knows for sure. The earliest record is a definition in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785): “To kick the bucket, to die.” The theory the Oxford English Dictionary prefers (as reported by English Wiktionary and Phrase Finder) uses an old meaning of bucket, a beam that slaughtered pigs were hung from, so the kicking would be the animal’s death throes. The popular story of someone standing on a bucket to hang himself has no evidence behind it, and a 1949 Catholic pamphlet’s claim about holy-water buckets set at a dead person’s feet is no better documented.
Mistakes learners make with Kick the bucket
Using it about someone the listener is grieving. It’s flippant, so “I’m sorry your father kicked the bucket” sounds cruel; “passed away” is the kind version.
Other English idioms like Kick the bucket
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?
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