wastebasket

waste +‎ basket

wastebasket (plural wastebaskets)

1. A usually small indoor receptacle for items that are to be discarded; a rubbish bin.
2. (figurative, by extension) Any region or grouping that is worthless or meaningless.
   • 2017, Russell Tuttle, The Functional and Evolutionary Biology of Primates, page 122:

     The order Insectivora provides such a taxonomic wastebasket in classifications of the placental mammals.

   • 2008, Harald Burger, ‎Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij, ‎Peter Kühn, Phraseologie / Phraseology (volume 2, page 819)

     For these reasons, the study of idioms, proverbs, stock metaphors, and other conversational gambits has been mostly discouraged, and at best relegated to research in pragmatics, or the “linguistic wastebasket” […]

• See also Thesaurus:waste bin

• wastebasket taxon

wastebasket (third-person singular simple present wastebaskets, present participle wastebasketing, simple past and past participle wastebasketed)

1. (transitive) To discard in a wastebasket.
   • ante 1924 (posthumous, died 1910): Mark Twain, Autobiography

     I was aweary, aweary, and I put it in the waste basket. Ten days later the bill came again, and with it a shadowy threat. I waste-basketed it.

• wastepaper basket