"Kick the bucket" Definition

Definitions for the word "Kick the bucket" from multiple English dictionaries.

1. slang
to die.—_Norfolk._ According to Forby, a metaphor taken from the descent of a well or mine, which is of course absurd. The Rev. E. S. Taylor supplies the following note from his MS. additions to the work of the East-Anglian lexicographer:— “The allusion is to the way in which a slaughtered pig is hung up—viz., by passing the ends of a bent piece of wood behind the tendons of the hind legs, and so suspending it to a hook in a beam above. This piece of wood is locally termed a BUCKET, and so by a coarse metaphor the phrase came to signify to die.” Another correspondent says the real signification of this phrase is to commit suicide by hanging, from a method planned and carried out by an ostler at an inn on the Great North Road. Standing on a bucket, he tied himself up to a beam in the stable; he then KICKED THE BUCKET away from under his feet, and in a few seconds was dead. The natives of the West Indies have converted the expression into “kickeraboo.”
Source: The Slang Dictionary, 1864

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