Why is dying called kicking the bucket

In the modern day, this is a casual way to say an acquaintance, or perhaps someone not held in high regard, has passed away.

He kicked the bucket — had a heart attack, I think. When speaking about death in an informal manner, it is common to say that someone has kicked the bucket , rather than died or passed away. This origin has been dismissed on the sole ground that the first and subsequent editions of Dictionary of Phrase and Fable , originally compiled by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer , give the following explanation:.

To kick the bucket. A bucket is a pulley; and in Norfolk a beam, called in Lincolnshire a buckler. When pigs are killed, they are hung by their hind-legs on a bucket, with their heads downwards, and oxen are hauled up by a pulley. To kick the bucket is to be hung on the bulk or bucket by the heels. Although to kick the bucket had never before been used with specific relation to Norfolk or with reference to pigs suspended by their heels, the success of the various editions of this dictionary gave currency to this explanation.

For example, the review of one these editions, in the Gloucester Journal of 29 th January , contains the following:. How often does one use expressions very common amongst the most illiterate, the origin of which we have never heard?

The subsequent death-throe spasms of the unfortunate animals created the impression that they were "kicking the bucket". The derivation is either from Old French buquet a balance or the fact that the raising of the yoke on a pulley resembled a bucket being lifted from a well.

The term is known to date from at least the 16th century. The more interesting and probably apochryphal origin relates to suicides who would stand on a large bucket with noose around the neck and, at the moment of their choosing, would kick away the bucket. Andy Parkin, Moortown, Leeds. Originally popularised by black-face minstrels, "Kick the bucket" comes, via kickeraboo dead , from the West African Ga words kekre, stiff and bo to end up , and also the Sierra Leone Creole Krio kekerabu dead.

Tony Aitman, Black Voices, Liverpool. Wonderful stuff, but he must be disabused as to the African origin of the word "jazz" at least to the extent of a "not proven" verdict. Fifty years of listening and studying the stuff has failed to convince me of any conclusive derivation. It is a word of a distinctly dubious etymology. Most dictionaries, including the illustrious Oxford Dictionary, cautiously restrict themselves to "20th Century.

Why should kicking one be associated with dying? The link between buckets and death was made by at least , when the phrase was defined in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue :.

One theory, albeit with little evidence to support it, is that the phrase originates from the notion that people hanged themselves by standing on a bucket with a noose around their neck and then kicking the bucket away.