Word.ws English Dictionary

bucket shop

bucket shop noun: a stockbroking firm which takes small orders from clients and takes them on its own account rather than actually transmitting them to the market. Prevalent in the US 1870s to 1920s; often set up as shop-fronts in the 1920s.

Noun

bucket shop (plural bucket shops)

  1. (derogatory, obsolete) A stockbroking firm which takes small orders from clients and takes them on its own account rather than actually transmitting them to the market. Prevalent in the US 1870s to 1920s; often set up as shop-fronts in the 1920s.
  2. (derogatory) A stockbroking firm which sells stock to clients when it has an undisclosed relationship with that company or its owners.
  3. (dated) A travel agency selling discounted airfares, usually in defiance of existing minimum fare arrangements. Now usually refers to any small cheap agency.
  4. A legal services firm selling heavily discounted legal services and documents made in large volume from boilerplate text and clauses, sometimes as a white labelled loss leader.
  5. A company that sells coats of arms associated with the customer's surname, regardless of whether the customer can claim any relation to the original armiger.

Forms of bucket shop

pluralbucket shops
alternative formbucketshop

Origin of bucket shop

bucket + shop

Questions about bucket shop

What does bucket shop mean?
Bucket shop means a stockbroking firm which takes small orders from clients and takes them on its own account rather than actually transmitting them to the market. Prevalent in the US 1870s to 1920s; often set up as shop-fronts in the 1920s.
What part of speech is bucket shop?
Bucket shop is a noun.
What is the plural of bucket shop?
The plural of bucket shop is bucket shops.

Words near bucket shop in the dictionary

  1. bucket orchid
  2. bucket orchids
  3. bucket rendering
  4. bucket seat
  5. bucket seats
  6. bucket shop
  7. bucket shopper
  8. bucket shops
  9. bucket sort
  10. bucket sorts
  11. bucket steak

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bucket shop (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bucket shop.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bucket_shop. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.