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hash bucket


hash bucket: n. A notional receptacle, a set of which might be
   used to apportion data items for sorting or lookup purposes.  When
   you look up a name in the phone book (for example), you typically
   hash it by extracting its first letter; the hash buckets are the
   alphabetically ordered letter sections.  This term is used as
   techspeak with respect to code that uses actual hash functions; in
   jargon, it is used for human associative memory as well.  Thus, two
   things `in the same hash bucket' are more difficult to
   discriminate, and may be confused.  "If you hash English words
   only by length, you get too many common grammar words in the first
   couple of hash buckets." Compare hash collision.