"empty basket" is a correct and usable part of a sentence in written English.
For example, "I carried the empty basket back to the store."
And then the villagers saw him loosely swinging the empty basket across the clearing to his hut.
On a typical trip to the supermarket shopping for food, a consumer would end up with an almost empty basket if they attempted to avoid products wrapped with plastics.
I climbed five flights of stairs, each shabbier than the last, and saw, through an opening in the stairwell, an empty basket being lowered down the side of the building on a long rope.
Stepping through the curtained doorway, you took an empty basket off the counter, loaded it with skewers of meat, fish and vegetables, ordered a chilled beer or a bowl of cold sake, found a space by one of the open pits, and grilled your selected morsels to perfection.Bliss, but woe betide the clot who smoothered sauce over a juicy item and returned it to the smoldering coals.
And if you have an empty basket with you, you're likely to fill it.
But there's more to it: Retailers hope that carrying an empty basket will prompt you to fill it.
Empty baskets whizzed past us and jolted to a stop at the tunnel's entrance.
As our car inched forward, we watched dozens of local people, mostly women, empty baskets of rocks on the dirt road to create a roadbed.
At the faintest hum of an outboard engine, some 200 villagers, essentially the entire mobile population of Yagloo, run to the banks of the swollen Shabelle River with empty baskets and expectant eyes, hoping for powdered milk, a few handfuls of grain, some malaria pills, anything.
The bus never came, but a sanitation worker - one of the 7,899 "San Men" who keep New York City's streets clean - stopped emptying baskets to check in on her and make sure she was O.K. and knew her way.
When Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes, he lifts two almost-empty baskets above his head and then lowers them, now heaped with food.
