Word.ws English Dictionary

wastebasket

wastebasket noun: a usually small indoor receptacle for items that are to be discarded; a rubbish bin.

wastebasket: a usually small indoor receptacle for items that are to be discarded; a rubbish bin
Image: Dfrg.msc, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

wastebasket (plural wastebaskets)

  1. A usually small indoor receptacle for items that are to be discarded; a rubbish bin.
  2. (broadly, figuratively) Any region or grouping that is worthless or meaningless.
    • The order Insectivora provides such a taxonomic wastebasket in classifications of the placental mammals.2017, Russell Tuttle, The Functional and Evolutionary Biology of Primates, page 122
    • For these reasons, the study of idioms, proverbs, stock metaphors, and other conversational gambits has been mostly discouraged, and at best relegated to research in pragmatics, or the “linguistic wastebasket” […]2008, Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij, Peter Kühn, Phraseologie / Phraseology, volume 2, page 819

Verb

wastebasket (third-person singular simple present wastebaskets, present participle wastebasketing, simple past and past participle wastebasketed)

  1. (transitive) To discard in a wastebasket.
    • I was aweary, aweary, and I put it in the waste basket. Ten days later the bill came again, and with it a shadowy threat. I waste-basketed it.1924, Mark Twain, Autobiography

Forms of wastebasket

Noun
pluralwastebaskets
Verb
third-person singular presentwastebaskets
present participlewastebasketing
past participlewastebasketed
pastwastebasketed

Origin of wastebasket

From waste + basket.

Words formed from wastebasket

Phrases with wastebasket

Questions about wastebasket

What does wastebasket mean?
Wastebasket means a usually small indoor receptacle for items that are to be discarded; a rubbish bin.
What part of speech is wastebasket?
Wastebasket can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of wastebasket?
The plural of wastebasket is wastebaskets.

Words near wastebasket in the dictionary

  1. waste-goods
  2. waste-ridden
  3. waste-time
  4. waste-water
  5. wasteable
  6. wastebasket
  7. wastebasket taxa
  8. wastebasket taxon
  9. wastebasketed
  10. wastebasketing
  11. wastebaskets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wastebasket (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: “wastebasket.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wastebasket. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.