bucket list

noun

Etymology: 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.

1. A list of tasks arising during a meeting that are put aside to be dealt with later.

   “A "bucket" list is simply a formal procedure for recording items of concern that arise during work on other agenda items.”

   “The figures and section drawings contain many of the most important locus numbers. We are not publishing a complete bucket list.”

2. A list of things to accomplish before one's death.

   “Q: What projects are you working on now and in the near future? [Rob Reiner] I'm hoping by the end of October to be shooting a film I've been working on called "The Bucket List," starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. […] They find out they are terminal. They know they don't have much longer to live. It's about working out the issues you need to work out before you die. […] Q: Do you have your own "bucket list"? [Reiner] You know, I don't. I've gone on with my life always trying to do positive things and make things better and the world better. […] I want to see my kids do well, but that's not a "bucket list"”

   “I'm a helicopter pilot, not a writer. Still, it's been a dream of mine to someday write a book. It's ranked near the top on my list of things I want to do someday, my "bucket list," if you will.”

3. A list of things to accomplish before one's death.

   “a winter bucket list”

4. A data structure containing buckets used in a hashing algorithm.

   “Using a bucket list structure[…], the program sorts each incoming word serially, constructing a list within each of 256 buckets for good words of a given alphabetic range […]”

   “In place of direct storage in the block we might substitute pointers to linked bucket lists of the elements having the same hash addresses. After hashing B#95;x and retrieving the pointer to the appropriate bucket list, we search the list for B#95;x, and if not found, add it to the end of the list.”