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A bucket for holding a quantity of paint during the painting process.
Usage notes
In most varieties of English outside the United States (UK, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian), if not specified otherwise, kettle usually refers to a vessel or appliance used to boil water.
kettle (third-person singular simple presentkettles, present participlekettling, simple past and past participlekettled)
(originally British, of the police) To contain demonstrators in a confined area.
2009 April 2, John O'Connor, “G20: The upside of kettling: The Guardian”, in The Guardian:
Life for senior officers has been made much easier by the use of counter-terrorism powers, which enable them to contain demonstrators for hours in a confined spot. This tactic, known as kettling, is seen by some as an attempt to prevent people lawfully demonstrating.
2011 October 12, Gregory Djerejian, “This Ain't No Tea Party: A Conservative Defense of Occupy Wall Street”, in The Atlantic:
A couple of the initial pepper spray incidents went viral on YouTube, one showing very young women screaming hysterically while penned—or is the term for this ‘kettled’?—by bright orange police mesh.
^ Hans Kurath and Raven Ioor McDavid (1961). The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States: based upon the collections of the linguistic atlas of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 133.