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}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {hash collision}]