Word.ws English Dictionary

in the bucket

in the bucket prepositional phrase: short of money, or in debt (by a specified amount).

Prepositional phrase

  1. (slang) Short of money, or in debt (by a specified amount).
    • If you find that you are only $500 dollars in the bucket, don't think you will only need $500 dollars in cash, either.1984, The Superstars of Rock, page 166
    • She said once they won a thousand, but by then they were already thirty thousand in the bucket.2008, Stephen King, Just After Sunset

Questions about in the bucket

What does in the bucket mean?
In the bucket means short of money, or in debt (by a specified amount).
What part of speech is in the bucket?
In the bucket is a prepositional phrase.

Words near in the bucket in the dictionary

  1. in the biblical sense
  2. in the black
  3. in the blink of an eye
  4. in the books
  5. in the bottom of the bag
  6. in the bucket
  7. in the buff
  8. in the business of
  9. in the can
  10. in the cards
  11. in the clear

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: in the bucket (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.

Last updated:

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