Comment 15 for bug 406626

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written. <http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/>

Unfortunately, the BNC Web site's search function does not seem to distinguish between parts of speech. For example, <http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=trash> returns 219 occurrences of "trash", but these are a mixture of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

Fortunately, the BNC is collated at <http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/bnc-readme.html>, where parts of speech are distinguished. Using the "all.al.gz" list <http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/BNClists/all.al.gz>, we find:
* 1 occurrence of "rubbish-bin"
* 9 occurrences of "wastebasket"
* 14 occurrences of "wastebin" (and 1 of "wastebins")
* 150 occurrences of "trash" as a noun, plus 49 more where it was unclear whether it was being used as a noun, a proper noun, or a verb.

The collated list does not include non-hyphenated phrases, but going back to the main BNC Web site we can see that "rubbish bin" occurs 42 times in the corpus <http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=rubbish+bin>, and "recycle bin" doesn't occur at all <http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=recycle+bin>. ("Deleted items" is, as expected, completely absent too.)

From this I conclude that "trash" is, in UK English, far and away more common than "rubbish bin", "wastebin", or "wastebasket".