bucket list
Pluralbucket lists
- 1A list of things a person hopes to accomplish before they die.
Seeing the northern lights has been on her bucket list for years.
Skydiving was the last item left on my grandfather's bucket list.
Note
This meaning came into wide use around Rob Reiner's film The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, which he was preparing to shoot in 2006. For a while writers flagged it as new: Robert Deeter, in Bullseye: Journal of a Black Hawk Pilot (2009), calls writing a book part of his "bucket list," if you will. Things are usually on, added to or crossed off one's bucket list.
- 2A list of things to get done before a particular deadline or within a particular period of time.
Ice skating on the lake is at the top of our winter bucket list.
Before graduation, she wrote a senior-year bucket list and checked off every item by June.
Note
A looser use that keeps the shape of the lifetime list but swaps death for a nearer deadline. The period usually comes first, as a modifier: a winter bucket list, a summer bucket list, a senior-year bucket list. The tone is lighter too, closer to a to-do list for having fun than a reckoning with mortality.
- 3A list of tasks that come up during a meeting and are set aside to be dealt with later.
Let's put the budget question on the bucket list and get back to the schedule.
At the end of the session, the facilitator went through the bucket list and gave each item an owner.
Note
The bucket is probably an imagined container: issues that come up mid-meeting are dropped into it so the discussion can stay on track, then taken out and dealt with later. Facilitators also call the same list a parking lot, and in this sense the phrase is often set in quotation marks, the way office jargon tends to be.
- 4A data structure made up of buckets, used in a hashing algorithm.
The compiler stores its symbol table as a bucket list, with each bucket holding names that hash to the same value.
Each insertion appends the new record to the matching bucket list.
Note
In hashing, keys that land on the same hash address share a bucket, and each bucket's items are kept as a linked list. A lookup hashes the key, follows a pointer to the right bucket and searches only that short list. The term names both the whole arrangement and the list in a single bucket, and programmers were already using it in 1960.
Practice
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Origin
From bucket + list. The meeting sense may allude to a notional bucket where tasks are put to be dealt with later, while the "before one's death" sense refers to kick the bucket, "to die". That sense was coined in 1999 by the screenwriter Justin Zackham, who shortened his "List of Things to Do before I Kick the Bucket" to "Justin's Bucket List", and it was popularized by his film The Bucket List (2007).