Where did the term “kick the bucket” come from?
it sounds like a 19th century down south comment or a farmers term. “kick the bucket” has been documented as slang for “to die” since 1785, when Captain Francis Grose included it in his “Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” no one has been able to prove its origin with absolute certainty. According to a marvelous little book called “Slang Down the Ages” by Jonathon Green (published in the U.S. as “Slang Through the Ages”), one method of slaughtering a pig used to involve hanging it upside down from a beam in the barn designed for the purpose and called a “bucket.” In its death throes, the dying animal would then, naturally, “kick the bucket.” One bit of corroborative evidence in favor of the “pig slaughtering” theory of “kick the bucket” is the fact that “bucket” has existed as an antiquated English word meaning “beam” since around 1570, probably drawn from the Old French word “buquet,” meaning “balance.” (This “bucket” is unrelated to the more common English word “bucket” meaning “pail,”
