Where and when did "Bucket List" come to mean what it does today?
I'm not sure I had even heard the term "bucket list" until the movie came out. I get the feeling though that the term long predates the movie. Can anyone identify how "bucket list" came to mean what it means to us today?
Solution 1:
Bucket list
There's no known evidence bucket list was used as a "list of things to do before you die" before the movie.
The OED has bucket list from 29 June 2006, about the film "The Bucket List".
- There's no evidence in Nexis of bucket list before 2006.
- There's nothing in Usenet and Google Groups for "my bucket list" before the OED.
- There's nothing relevant in Usenet (via Google Groups) for "bucket list" much before the OED. (Lots of unrelated programming bucket lists.)
I think it came from the movie, by scriptwriter Justin Zackham. The most likely origin is it comes from the phrase "to kick the bucket", meaning to die.
Antedatings
Here's a one-day antedating from Variety referring to the film (found via Usenet):
Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are committed to star in “The Bucket List.”
Via the same Usenet group, a 16 June 2006 blogpost quoting a 11 June 2006 Usenet post referred to the script:
So it seems pretty solid that Scott is, in fact, not the author of The Bucket List.
But obviously the script had already been written and there'll be early script drafts somewhere.
Dubious claims
Slate Magazine searched Google Books and claimed a 2004:
In 2004, the term was used—perhaps for the first time?—in the context of things to do before one kicks the bucket (a phrase in use since at least 1785) in the book Unfair & Unbalanced: The Lunatic Magniloquence of Henry E. Panky, by Patrick M. Carlisle. That work includes the sentences, “So, anyway, a Great Man, in his querulous twilight years, who doesn’t want to go gently into that blacky black night. He wants to cut loose, dance on the razor’s edge, pry the lid off his bucket list!”
But I think it's misdated. Carlisle's book may have been first published in 2004, but the two full view editions in Google Books are copyright 2003-2010 and 2003-2011. The phrase also appears in the author biography at the end of the book and it's not clear when that was written.
The phrase appears on the author's biography on his own website, but not in any of the pages I checked in the Internet Archive.
Also, a Wordwizard forum post claims a 9 November 2005 on a AP Images caption of actors in a scene from the movie, but it must be wrong seeing as the script and actors were only announced in 2006.
Computing
Bucket list has been used in computing literature much prior to the film, often referring to algorithms for "bucket sort", a way of sorting data. Wikipedia lists a number of other bucket metaphors in computing. A bucket, also a bin, is sometimes a buffer, or place to discretely distribute data, and can be of fixed size.
I think it's safe to say there's no link between this and the modern meaning of things to do before you kick the bucket.
Solution 2:
A Google Books search doesn't produce any definite instances of "bucket list" prior to 2007 (the year the movie of that name came out) that used it in the sense of "a list of things to do before one dies."
However, the term goes back at least as far as 1965, as used in this U.S. National Bureau of Standards monograph, page 170 (1965) [snippet]:
To focus attention on the semantic aspects of word pairs rather than on their syntactic aspect, pairs of which one member is a function word, such as 'the', 'is', 'by', etc., are excluded. "Using a bucket list structure of the type proposed by C. J. Sheen in FN- 1634, the program sorts each incoming word serially, constructing a list within each of 256 buckets for good words of a given alphabetic range . . . and another list within each good word entry for the Doubles and Reverses which will be ordered alpahabetically...
To like effect, from Newman & Sproull, Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics (1979):
This is called the y-bucket list, because it is generated by a bucket sort in which each edge is entered in the "bucket" corresponding to its maximum y value.
It appears that in computer science (and perhaps elsewhere) "bucket list" had a well-established meaning long before the "before I die" meaning arose. It may be that someone who was exposed to the algorithmic meaning of "bucket list" made the connection with "kicking the bucket" and either humorously or naively introduced the new meaning.
UPDATE: With regard to the earliest occurrence of bucket list in the sense of "things to do before you die," here is an interesting blog post dated June 25, 2004, by Erica Firment on the Librarian Avengers website: Graduation Bucket List. I don't know whether the date is correct and whether it applies to the headline as well as to the body of the post—but if it is correct, it would antedate the film The Bucket List by about three years.