JargonFile/entries/hash bucket.txt
2014-04-26 16:54:15 +01:00

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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.