bit bucket

Meanings

1. A container for holding chad (“small punched-out pieces of paper”) from paper tape or punch cards used with teleprinters, early computers, and other machines.
2. An imaginary domain that accepts lost, discarded, or useless digital data that does not reach its intended destination, such as data lost in transmission or due to errors; the notional resting place of lost or missing digital information.

1. To delete.

Etymology

The noun is derived from bit (“small amount of something; smallest unit of storage in a digital computer, consisting of a binary digit”) + bucket. Bit in this context originally referred to small pieces of paper punched out from paper tape or punch cards (see sense 1), but came to be regarded as the unit of data storage (sense 2). The verb is derived from the noun.