Word.ws English Dictionary

mercy buckets

mercy buckets phrase: thanks very much.

Phrase

mercy buckets

  1. (humorous) Thanks very much.
    • 1929 "Franklin W. Dixon" (Penguin, →ISBN) Hardy Boys 7: The Secret of the Caves, Chapter 16, p.89:
      "Well, anyhow, thanks a lot, Mr. Dumont," he added. "Mercy buckets, as you French say."
    • "Mercy buckets—a pleasure doing business with you, dude."2008 Jonathan Nasaw (Simon and Schuster, →ISBN) Fear Itself p.187

Forms of mercy buckets

alternative formmerci buckets

Origin of mercy buckets

A jocular malapropism (or phono-semantic matching) of French merci beaucoup (“thanks a lot”); influenced by buckets of (“lots of”).

Questions about mercy buckets

What does mercy buckets mean?
Mercy buckets means thanks very much.
What part of speech is mercy buckets?
Mercy buckets is a phrase.

Words near mercy buckets in the dictionary

  1. Mercutian
  2. Mercutians
  3. Mercutio
  4. mercy
  5. mercy bucket
  6. mercy buckets
  7. mercy chair
  8. mercy chairs
  9. mercy flush
  10. mercy flushes
  11. mercy fuck

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mercy buckets (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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