bucket list

The story

1. Old French · derived frombuquet“balance; trebuchet”
2. English todaybucket list

From bucket + list. Sense 1 (“list of tasks arising during a meeting”) may allude to a notional bucket in which tasks to be dealt with later are placed. Sense 2 (“list of things to accomplish before one’s death”) refers to kick the bucket (“to die”), bucket in this sense possibly referring to a beam to which a pig is hung by its heels after it has been slaughtered (possibly from Old French buquet (“balance; trebuchet”)). It was coined by the American and British screenwriter Justin Zackham in 1999 when he drew up “Justin’s List of Things to Do before I Kick the Bucket” which he shortened to “Justin’s Bucket List”. The first item on his list was to have a screenplay produced at a major Hollywood studio. After a few years, it occurred to him that the notion of a “bucket list” could be the basis for a film, so he wrote a screenplay about two dying men racing to complete their own bucket lists with the time they had left, which became the film The Bucket List (2007). The term was then popularized by the film.

First known use, by meaning

• from late 20th c. A list of tasks arising during a meeting that are put aside to be dealt with later.
• from late 20th c. A list of things to accomplish before one's death.
• from late 20th c. A list of things to accomplish before a certain deadline or in a certain time period.
• from mid 20th c. A data structure containing buckets used in a hashing algorithm.