A friend of mine mentioned her favorite pun from the British radio show "My Word": "His name was Skip because he was full of rubbish."
So I looked up 'skip' and found that it is roughly equivalent to a 'dumpster,' although there are certain differences. I said something about this being my new British slang word for the day.
And was promptly told "It's not slang, and it's not British. We use it in the US, too."
I tried to research, but I don't know how to look up the use of the word 'skip' as a shipping container or rubbish bin as opposed to any of its other meanings using Google ngram.
Can anyone help me as to 1) whether it is considered 'slang' and 2) whether it's commonly used in the United States as well as Britain and (apparently) Australia?
"Skip" is used in some parts of the US, but I too think of it as mainly British. "Tip", with exactly the same meaning, seems to be exclusively British, so maybe that's the source of the confusion. The US term "dumpster" seems to be a trademarked name that has become generic.
The Brits also refer to "wheelie bins", which is their name for the large wheeled trash containers you have to take out to the curb. That term doesn't seem to have travelled to the States at all.
Kaa said: I tried to research, but I don't know how to look up the use of the word 'skip' as a shipping container or rubbish bin as opposed to any of its other meanings using Google ngram.
Using Ngrams can be tricky in that respect, but I finally hit on the 3-word phrase "fill the skip" (to differentiate from "skip" as a verb or "skip" as a noun describing the action of radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere. What I got was this.
Looking at some of the book excerpts cited, it appears it was originally used in the context of a large bucket for raising and lowering things into mines, or the holds of ships. So it was, in general, a container with some kind of mechanism built in for moving it and emptying it (eye-hooks, handles, whatever). The transition from its original use to a container for holding rubbish seems like a natural evolution. I had not heard it used that way, growing up in the Midwest, nor here in Arizona where I now live. It was always just a "dumpster" or "trash bin" to me. Hard to tell though whether the books were written in American English of British English, but it seemed like a mix of both.
 "We use it in the US, too." Â
Utube has lots of clips starring Brit , Australian. Any US usage at all should win a prize. And it's not slang.
'Round here (sw MO), one pays tipping fees when trash is unloaded at a landfill.