kick the bucket
Formskicks the bucket, kicking the bucket, kicked the bucket
- 1To die; a lighthearted, colloquial expression usually chosen for humorous effect.
The movie's villain finally kicks the bucket in a ridiculous accident involving a piano.
She says she refuses to kick the bucket before seeing her grandchildren graduate.
Similardie, perish, expire, croak, pass
Note
A euphemism that softens death by joking about it rather than veiling it. Jan Morris used it in 2015 for the moment her posthumous book would go to press, and that wry, self-directed use is where it fits best. Used about someone else's loss, especially to a mourner, it sounds flippant. Its origin is unsettled: the best-known story, of a suicide kicking away the pail beneath a noose, is admitted guesswork.
- 2To break down so completely that it cannot be repaired; said of machines, vehicles, and other equipment.
The office printer kicked the bucket right in the middle of tax season.
We've kept this van going for a decade, but the transmission could kick the bucket on any long trip.
Note
Here the joke about dying is turned on machinery. An appliance or engine is spoken of as if it had died, which is why the phrase signals the end rather than a fixable fault. It usually reports something already over, as in has kicked the bucket. It suits casual talk about one's own sewing machine or car better than a technician's report.
Practice
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Origin
The origin is uncertain, but the Oxford English Dictionary offers a few theories. One speculative idea is that a person committing suicide would stand on a bucket with a noose around their neck and kick it away. The OED finds more plausible an older sense of 'bucket' as a beam from which a pig was hung before slaughter, so 'kick the bucket' first described the pig's death throes.