Bins

How to spell bins

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bins

What does bins mean?

1. nounOpen-topped containers used for storing or discarding things.
2. verbThrows something away as rubbish (informal British usage).

Bins in a sentence

• noun

  The recycling bins are emptied every other Tuesday.

• verb

  He bins any flyer that lands on the doormat.

• noun

  She sorted the screws into labelled bins on the workbench.

• verb

  The office manager bins every duplicate report without reading it.

Where does bins come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word bin comes from Old English binne, meaning a manger, crib, or container for storage, a sense that may itself trace back through a Celtic root for a basket or hollow vessel. For centuries a bin was simply a fixed receptacle, such as a corn bin or a coal bin in which a household kept its supplies. Over time the word broadened to cover any open-topped container, and in modern British usage it became the everyday term for the rubbish or waste container that Americans more often call a trash can. The plural and verb form bins is built by adding the regular English -s, which carries no spelling trap of its own; the only thing to remember is the single n in the singular doubling to nn only in older spellings, while the modern form keeps one n before the s.

How the word is built

• bin (container; Old English binn)
• -s (plural/third-person marker)