Since I last addressed it fifteen years ago, I feel that “bin”–what Americans would wordily call “garbage can,” “trash can,” “wastepaper basket,” or (less wordily) “garbage”–has been making progress here. Most recent evidence is this Facebook ad from an American leather company:
Still no sign of “bin” as a verb.
I wonder if the recent, widespread media coverage of by-election candidate and Nigel Farage nemesis ‘Count Binface’ has brought ‘bin’ into the public consciousness in the wider English-speaking world.
As I recall, in the UK it was usually ‘dustbin’ in the ’60s and ’70s. I think the briefer form has now supplanted it. In 1970 the dustmen went on strike. Nowadays, I never hear or see that word because ‘bin men’ has replaced it (and these being modern times, some people don’t want to use such a sexist term: a council may advertise to employ ‘refuse loaders’ but this phrase has yet to enter everyday parlance).
A dustbin is not the only sort of bin. A dustbin is the large cylindrical receptacle left outside the house to be collected. In the UK, they have now mainly been replaced by rectangular wheelie bins.
But there is also the wastepaper bin, the bread bin and the wine bin. And bins, I’m told, is an informal term for binoculars.
BIN seems innocent enough but has WHEELY BIN arrived in the US? Americans resident in the UK seem to love it and it does fill a gap.