bin
/bɪn
/British
noun
1A receptacle in which to deposit rubbish.Bin wagons, rubbish bins and boxes are all in line for a major shake-up to smooth the way for kerbside recycling....
- The level of organisation is very impressive, though I'm not sure about the symbolism of the count supervisors using an empty ballot box as a rubbish bin.
- He pointed it out to me and I walked across to the bin and deposited the package of shells.
1.1 [with modifier] A capacious receptacle for storing a specified substance: a compost bin...
- There have also been problems with the brown bin or composting bin service, with a handful of households contaminating it with dead animals and non-recyclable waste.
- We have a worm farm and compost bin, have planted fruit trees and vegetables and plan to plant up an area of natives next week.
- The scheme is designed to encourage residents to take part in council schemes, which include a compost bin offer and nappy laundering services.
Synonyms
container, receptacle, holder;
drum, canister, caddy, box, can, tin, crate
archaic reservatory
1.2A partitioned stand for storing bottles of wine.If you're wagering your hard-earned six bucks on an Uzbeki Pinot from a wine bin don't expect the earth to move when you drink it....
- This usually entails storing the bottles horizontally, ideally in a wine rack so that individual bottles can easily be extracted, or in a bin full of wines of the same sort.
- Set apart from the shelves of local stock, like aliens at an airport, a bin boldly featured wines from California.
2 Statistics Each of a series of ranges of numerical value into which data are sorted in statistical analysis.We performed the same statistical analysis on these synteny bins as described above for the human-mouse data....
- Ogilvie et al. divided trials into quartile bins based on the distribution of reaction time latencies.
- The spike in the rightmost bin of the series is due to the occurrence of an appreciable number of chromosomes without crossovers at that marker spacing.
verb (bins, binning, binned) [with object]
1 informal Throw (something) away by putting it in a bin: piles of junk that should have been binned years ago...
- Teachers in Bradford schools could help by teaching their pupils to bin rubbish instead of throwing it on the verges and pavements.
- This means you could be using a dodgy foundation that should have been binned months ago or throwing out a lipstick that still had a lot of life left in it.
- Nicole Avery bins her last pack of cigarettes, watched by the Carlton Clinic's Dr Andrew Bathie.
1.1Discard or reject: the whole idea had to be binned...
- Hence the string of television programmes that have been commissioned of late showing people binning their PAYE existence, going out on a limb and living by their own wits.
- Unfortunately, I'd recently stocked on this stuff and so had to put the case for phasing a new (yet to be announced) brand in rather than binning it all.
- Dr Oppenheim said: ‘I think the director dealt with the responses in a very restrained manner when she could have just binned them.’
1.2 (bin someone off) British informal End a relationship with someone: she was a bit weird so I binned her off
2Store (something, especially wine) in a bin: paint on the bottles indicated which way up they should be binned...
- As binning and storing wine became commonplace during the course of the 18th century, the wine bottle evolved into the cylindrical shape we know today.
- The new bottle shape caught the interest of contemporary wine merchants because it was ideal for "binning" wine horizontally in cellars for long periods of time.
- Stuart Blackwell, winemaker at reputed Barossa Valley producer St Hallett, cautions that, a great deal of care is required. There are problems with binning wine for storage the caps can be dented.
3 Statistics Group together (data) in bins.The mean-variance estimates were then binned into a two-dimensional histogram....
- The numbers of links to other domains in such graphs were logarithmically binned, and frequencies were thus obtained.
- Although this meant losing information due to binning quantitative data, it increased the power of the method to describe a large range of morphological variation and large patterns in evolutionary history.
Origin
Old English bin(n), binne, of Celtic origin; related to Welsh ben 'cart'. The original meaning was 'receptacle' in a general sense; also 'a receptacle for provender in a stable' and 'container for grain, bread, or other foodstuffs'. The sense 'receptacle for rubbish' dates from the mid 19th century.