wastebasket

plural wastebaskets

1. A usually small indoor receptacle for items that are to be discarded; a rubbish bin.
2. broadlyfigurativelyAny region or grouping that is worthless or meaningless.

   The order Insectivora provides such a taxonomic wastebasket in classifications of the placental mammals.

   2017, Russell Tuttle, The Functional and Evolutionary Biology of Primates, page 122

   1 more example

   For these reasons, the study of idioms, proverbs, stock metaphors, and other conversational gambits has been mostly discouraged, and at best relegated to research in pragmatics, or the “linguistic wastebasket” […]

   2008, Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij, Peter Kühn, Phraseologie / Phraseology, volume 2, page 819

present singular third person wastebaskets · participle present wastebasketing · participle past wastebasketed · past wastebasketed

1. transitiveTo discard in a wastebasket.

   I was aweary, aweary, and I put it in the waste basket. Ten days later the bill came again, and with it a shadowy threat. I waste-basketed it.

   1924, Mark Twain, Autobiography