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(figurative, by extension) Any region or grouping that is worthless or meaningless.
2017, Russell Tuttle, The Functional and Evolutionary Biology of Primates, page 122:
The order Insectivora provides such a taxonomic wastebasket in classifications of the placental mammals.
2008, Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij, Peter Kühn, Phraseologie / Phraseology, volume 2, page 819:
For these reasons, the study of idioms, proverbs, stock metaphors, and other conversational gambits has been mostly discouraged, and at best relegated to research in pragmatics, or the “linguistic wastebasket” […]
