kick the bucket

/kɪk ðə ˈbʌkɪt/

/kɪk ðə ˈbʌkɪt/

Other forms: kicked the bucket; kicks the bucket; kicking the bucket

When you kick the bucket, you die. Kick the bucket is an extremely informal way to describe death.

If you're looking for a delicate way to talk about someone dying, kick the bucket isn't the right way to do it — it's a blunt and casual, almost joking way to say "die." The origin is a little blurry, though most experts think it stems from the Old French buquet, a trébuchet or beam from which slaughtered — and possibly still kicking — animals were hung.

Definitions of kick the bucket

1. verb

   pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life
   “The old guy kicked the bucket at the age of 102”

   synonyms: buy the farm, cash in one's chips, choke, conk, croak, decease, die, drop dead, exit, expire, give-up the ghost, go, pass, pass away, perish, pop off, snuff it

   break, break down, conk out, die, fail, give out, give way, go, go bad

   stop operating or functioning

   die

   suffer or face the pain of death

   types:

   abort

   cease development, die, and be aborted

   asphyxiate, stifle, suffocate

   be asphyxiated; die from lack of oxygen

   buy it, pip out

   be killed or die;

   drown

   die from being submerged in water, getting water into the lungs, and asphyxiating

   predecease

   die before; die earlier than

   famish, starve

   die of food deprivation

   fall

   die, as in battle or in a hunt

   succumb, yield

   be fatally overwhelmed

   strangle

   die from strangulation

   type of:

   change state, turn

   undergo a transformation or a change of position or action