Other forms: boxes
A box is a container with straight sides. A cardboard box, a box of matches, put it in a box.
The material or contents go in front: shoebox, toolbox, matchbox, lunchbox. In a theatre a box is a private seating compartment, and in sport a box is a marked area. As a verb, box means to fight with gloves, which is a separate word. Note think outside the box; box clever, which is British for being shrewd; and box in, meaning to trap somebody with no room to move.
1nounboxA container with straight sides.~47%
“She packed her books into a big cardboard box.”
2nounmarkedA marked area or private compartment.~53%
“The ball was cleared out of the box in about the last minute.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
box is a container or marked area.
Latin buxis meant a box made of boxwood, from Greek pyxos, the box tree. The container is named after the tree it was cut from, which is why the shrub and the container share a name.
Middle English
box
English, today
box
From Middle English box. From Middle English box (“container, box, cup”), from Old English box (“box, case”), from Proto-West Germanic buhsā (“box”) from Latin buxis (“box”), Latin pyxis (“small box for medicines or toiletries”), of uncertain origin; compare Ancient Greek πυξίς (“box or tablet made of boxwood; box; cylinder”) and πύξος (“box tree; boxwood”). a doublet of piseog and pyx and pyxis. Cognate with Middle Dutch bosse, busse (“jar; tin; round box”) (modern Dutch bos (“wood, forest”), bus (“container, box; bushing of a wheel”)), Old High German buhsa (Middle High German buhse, bühse, modern German Büchse (“box; can”)), Swedish bössa (“box”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA