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.