The Origins of ‘Bucket List’

The phrase ‘bucket list’ made its way from a screenwriter’s bulletin board to usage by President Obama—but changed its meaning on the way

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Jack Nicholson, left, and Morgan Freeman in ‘The Bucket List’ Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

Ben Zimmer

The Wall Street Journal

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May 29, 2015 10:26 a.m. ET

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At the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, President Barack Obama had some fun with a familiar two-word phrase: “bucket list.”

“After the midterm elections, my advisers asked me, ‘Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?’” Mr. Obama said. “And I said, well, I have something that rhymes with ‘bucket list’....”

The president’s devil-may-care attitude about the end of his second term was good for a laugh, and it also pointed to how the meaning of “bucket list” has subtly shifted since it was popularized by the movie “The Bucket List” in 2007.

Morgan Freeman explains the ‘bucket list.’

The “bucket list” originally meant a list of things that one would like to do before dying—that is, before “kicking the bucket.” In the film, Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson play terminal cancer patients living it up while they still can.

But now, a “bucket list” doesn’t have to be so morbid. It can simply be a wish list to be accomplished by a certain deadline—like the end of Mr. Obama’s term of office. Similarly, you can find many suggestions online for your “summer bucket list”: things to do before autumn comes.

All of this has moved far from the idiom of “kicking the bucket.” That expression, etymologists conjecture, originated with a now-forgotten meaning of “bucket”: a beam, probably from the Old French word “buquet,” meaning “balance.” The idiom referred to hanging up animals for slaughter, who would then, in their death throes, kick that beam.

Back in 1999, the screenwriter Justin Zackham was thinking about that phrase when he began composing a checklist that he called, “Justin’s list of things to do before he kicks the bucket.” After finishing the list, he told me via email, he thought of a more succinct title for it: “Justin’s bucket list.”

After a few years of keeping his “bucket list” pinned to his bulletin board, Mr. Zackham realized that it could serve as the basis for a film script, and he wrote the screenplay for “The Bucket List.” In production, he and director Rob Reiner toyed with other, more straightforward titles, Mr. Zackham said, “but everyone seemed to like it, so it stuck.”

The film’s release brought the phrase into common parlance, and, as a testament to how natural and idiomatic it sounds, many people assume the term must have long predated the movie.

More Word on the Street

Since then, as the “bucket list” has become entrenched in the popular consciousness, people often forget its roots in “kicking the bucket.” Some might imagine instead that the wish list figuratively fills a bucket, giving the phrase a new metaphorical foundation.

And how does the creator of the original “bucket list” feel about the mutation of the phrase? “It’s been quite fun actually,” Mr. Zackham said. “I get a kick out of all of the permutations because they’re all additive—different ways to make your life (or even just your summer) better.”

But he is proudest of how the phrase has inspired people. Alice Pyne, a British teenager with terminal cancer, blogged her own “bucket list” before she died in 2013. A charity to provide holidays for dying children lives on in her name, as does her wish “to get everyone to have a bucket list.”