Meaning in Plain English

To kick the bucket is an informal way of saying that someone has died. The fixed phrase is a euphemism with a light or joking tone, so it can sound flippant in formal or grieving settings.

  • The narrator says the fictional miser kicked the bucket years before the story begins.
  • If that old toaster kicks the bucket, we will finally buy a new one.
  • Because her friend was grieving, Maya said that his father had died rather than that he had kicked the bucket.

The Documented Record: The Phrase in Print from 1775

The earliest printed use that Word Histories has located appears in The History of Edward and Maria, a story serialized in The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer for August 1775. A sailor is greeted on returning to his ship: "my old mess-mate, Tom Bowline, met me at the gangway, and with a salute as hearty as honest, damn'd his eyes, but he was glad that I had not kicked the bucket." The writer felt no need to explain the phrase, which suggests it was already in ordinary slang use.

Eighteenth-century slang dictionaries soon recorded it. Francis Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines it: "To Kick the Bucket. To die. He kicked the bucket one day; he died one day" — wording confirmed in the digitized 1788 edition at the Internet Archive. Phrase Finder and Etymonline date the entry to the dictionary's 1785 first edition.

An essay "On the Misapplication of Wit" in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (March 1793) listed "kick'd the bucket" among the fashionable ways of avoiding the word "death", observing that such expressions "have been in vulgar use as long as the present generation can remember". Satirical papers used it too: The Bath Chronicle of 23 January 1794 joked that "to die in one's bed is 'to kick the bucket'" (both quoted via Word Histories).

The Theories, and What Separates Evidence from Folklore

No surviving document explains how the phrase began. What exists is: the early print record above; a documented 1788 account of a death by hanging with a bucket, which supplies the most popular theory with its literal image; a theory about slaughterhouse beams popularized in 1870; and folk explanations with no published support, such as the holy-water story. None of the theories explains why the phrase appeared when it did or how it spread.

The Hanging Story: An Actual 1788 Report, but Not a Documented Origin

The most widely repeated story is that a person about to hang himself stood on an upturned bucket, tied the rope, and kicked the bucket away. The story is not pure invention. Jackson's Oxford Journal of 27 September 1788 reported that John Marshfield, a labourer, "hanged himself in an Out-House in Avon Street" — he put a cord around his neck, stood on a bucket, and "then kicked the Bucket to a considerable Distance from under him". The jury returned a verdict of felo de se, suicide (quoted via Word Histories).

But that report describes an actual event; it does not show that the idiom began this way, and the phrase was already in print thirteen years earlier. Anatoly Liberman, writing as The Oxford Etymologist on the Oxford University Press blog, records that a legend "spread in the slang fraternity almost at once" after the phrase appeared, and calls the story folk etymology — though he notes the OED's James Murray "did not reject the idea outright that kick the bucket originated with suicide". Phrase Finder is more dismissive: "there are no citations that relate the phrase to suicide".

The Slaughterhouse Beam: A Theory Popularized in 1870

A second theory turns on a different sense of the word bucket. In sixteenth-century English, "bucket" could mean a beam or yoke on which things were hung or carried: Peter Levins' 1570 dictionary Manipulus vocabulorum glosses "A Bucket, beame", and Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 has "swifter than he that gibbets on the brewer's bucket" (see Phrase Finder and the text at MIT). Etymonline traces this sense to French buquet, "balance", "a beam from which slaughtered animals were hung (by the heels or hooves)".

On that basis, the theory runs that pigs hung by the heels on a slaughterhouse "bucket" kicked it in their death throes, and the phrase was transferred to humans. It was popularized by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (first edition 1870), which gave "bucket" as a Norfolk term for such a beam, and by Farmer and Henley's Slang and Its Analogues. Word Histories notes that "to kick the bucket had never before been used with specific relation to Norfolk or with reference to pigs suspended by their heels", yet the success of Brewer's dictionary "gave currency to this explanation". Liberman raises two objections: why a technical East Anglian term would suddenly become national slang in the late eighteenth century, and why no one has shown butchers actually saying that a pig "kicked the bucket".

Holy Water and Other Unsupported Explanations

An older version of this article repeated a folk explanation about Catholic funeral customs: that a bucket of holy water was placed at the feet of a laid-out corpse, so the dead person's feet were associated with a bucket. The idea does circulate in print — Liberman quotes a 1947 note describing the custom — but he finds it implausible as an origin: the idiom has no religious overtones, and no one has produced an example of it being used in that context. The same verdict applies to the suggestion that the phrase comes from cows kicking over a milk pail (Liberman calls that explanation "totally without merit") and to assorted ideas about schoolboy slang.

What the Evidence Allows Us to Say

The honest summary is short. The phrase is documented from 1775 in the sense "to die"; by 1788 it was in Grose's slang dictionary; and a real suicide in Bath in 1788 gives the hanging story its image. That is where the documentation ends. As Liberman concludes, "none of the suggestions offered so far can be taken seriously" as a complete origin, and the answer to how the phrase began is origin unknown.

How to Use the Phrase

"Kick the bucket" is informal slang. It belongs in casual conversation, fiction, and humorous writing, not in formal obituaries, condolence messages, or any setting where real grief is being expressed. It is often applied to things as well as people — a machine or appliance can "kick the bucket" — and it is the source of the modern "bucket list" (a list of things to do before one dies, recorded from 2007, per Etymonline).

  • The company finally kicked the bucket after thirty years of trading.
  • When the kettle kicked the bucket, the whole office mourned.

Quick Questions

When did "kick the bucket" first appear in print?

Word Histories locates the earliest known printed use in The London Magazine for August 1775, where a sailor says he is glad his mess-mate had not "kicked the bucket".

Did people really die by kicking a bucket?

At least one documented case exists: Jackson's Oxford Journal reported in September 1788 that John Marshfield hanged himself in Bath by standing on a bucket and kicking it away. But the phrase was already in print before that death, so the report cannot be the idiom's origin.

Is the origin of the phrase known?

No. The Oxford Etymologist's conclusion is "origin unknown". The two leading theories — suicide by hanging and the slaughterhouse beam — have plausible images but no documentary proof, and the holy-water story has no evidence at all.

Sources and Further Reading