kick the bucket, to

Die, as in All of my goldfish kicked the bucket while we were on vacation. This moderately impolite usage has a disputed origin. Some say it refers to committing suicide by hanging, in which one stands on a bucket, fastens a rope around one's neck, and kicks the bucket away. A more likely origin is the use of bucket in the sense of "a beam from which something may be suspended" because pigs were suspended by their heels from such beams after being slaughtered, the term kick the bucket came to mean "to die." [Colloquial; late 1700s]

If someone kicks the bucket, they die. The doctor said the old girl is about to kick the bucket — got some sort of kidney infection. All the money goes to her when the old man kicks the bucket. Note: This expression is used in a humorous way. Note: The origins of this expression are uncertain. It may refer to someone committing suicide by standing on a bucket, tying a rope around their neck, then kicking the bucket away.

To die.

To die. This expression, which comes from eighteenth-century Britain, has several explanations. One is that the bucket referred to is the East Anglian word for a beam on which a pig is hung by its feet to be slaughtered and which it kicks against in its death struggles. Another theorizes that a person committing suicide by hanging may stand on an overturned bucket to fasten the rope and then kick it away. The term was loosely used for anyone dying by any means by 1785, when it was so defined in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.