bucket brigade

bucket brigade (plural bucket brigades)

1. The long line of people, in a primitive firefighting technique, who pass buckets of water hand-to-hand from the nearest water source to the site of a fire, in an attempt to douse it.
2. (by extension) Any process in which something is passed along a chain.
3. (electronics) A discrete-time analogue delay line that moves a signal along a line of capacitors, one step at each clock cycle.

• “bucket brigade”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• “bucket brigade”, in Collins English Dictionary.