No guarantee that the areas are still valid 140 years or so later. Perhaps this is in part because the household tool that gives rise to the one-time regionalism is now itself archaic/obsolete? pail of sand or bucket of sand Beautiful holiday metal bucket with vinyl front as shown. I hear bucket very frequently now. But as a kid, I could see using the term plastic pail, especially for a child's toy at the beach, for example. For me, as for some others here, "darning needle" was only a phrase in books. To me, a bucket is metal, and if I wanted a plastic bucket, then I would specify a "plastic bucket". Also pail, although I think bucket has largely replaced it in my own speech. Get it today with Same Day Delivery, Order Pickup or Drive Up. I share her distinction that a pail is metal, most of the time. Raised in Brooklyn in the 70s. I have no Idea who this Maria character is. — I don't recall ever hearing "milk bucket", only "milk pail", used by the dairy farmers that surrounded us. Rather unquaintly, however, the pail had a conspicuous warning label on it, of the sort presumably recommended by the lawyers/insurers of the manufacturer or someone else in the distribution chain (similar to but not identical to this one: http://www.thecuresafety.com/WARNING_Children_Can_Fall_Into_Bucket_And_Drown_p/bid1.htm), and that label used the word "bucket." I grew up in suburban Cleveland. The red, white and blue buckets have ... You know those ideas you get and you're not sure how they'll work out?That's how I felt about my idea to turn a five gallon bucket into a canvas tote.We just recently had some built ins put in upstairs in our old house, to block off a really dangerous ledge that goes out over the staircase. "Buckets" were rather more specialized things, like very big ones, the thing on a rope that you lower into a well, or perhaps the wooden ones in the Mickey Mouse "Sorcerer's Apprentice" cartoon. Bucket seats in a car are large enough for humans to occupy comfortably. Synonym: bucket And we did say "darning needle.". [(myl) A "wash tub". I have never used, nor ever heard anyone from around here use, the word "pail." But then I lived in the Lower Midwest (St Louis, Mo) and we didn't have "pails" there. Prior to this post, I never would have guessed that to be the case. Please excuse my confusing, but which side of the isogloss is supposed to use "pail"? ), Poor little bats seem to always get a bum rap—- sadly, one of the most misunderstood, and much-maligned creatures on our planet. So I'm certainly not vouching for the map, though it was made on the basis of dialect-atlas surveys done in the preceding decades. I have the impression both terms are sort of old-fashioned so it might be hard to do. I grew up in NYC in the 1950s and I remember darning needle, devil's darning needle, and dragonfly all in common circulation. I grew up outside of Boston in the 60's , with parents from New York, and we said pail. I'd have said pail too for that metal thing, though there are lots of kinds of buckets. My parents grew up on opposite sides of the isogloss and are old enough that 1949 data ought to be relevant, but to the extent I've ever been able to notice any differents in their speech, pail/bucket choice isn't it. Until I moved to Albany, I never heard see-saw. I actually agree that the first metal container shown could unremarkably be called a "pail." Even Jack and Jill got their water in a pail. Read reviews and buy Nuby 2pk Spoutless Tritan - Neutral at Target. The OED may be relevant here: "The precise range of vessels denoted by pail, as distinct from the near-synonymous bucket, has varied over time, and there continues to be much regional variation. That one sounds really "off" to me. (I still occasionally darn socks!). I grew up in the '70s and '80s in suburban Cincinnati, which was definitely bucket country for me.