box office

Alternative forms

 * box-office
 * boxoffice

Etymology
1786, presumably from sales of,. Sense of “total sales” from 1904.

Folk etymology is that this derives from, where theater admission was collected in a box attached to a long stick, passed around the audience. However, first attestation is over a century later (theaters were closed in 1642), making this highly unlikely.

Noun

 * 1)  A place where tickets are sold in a theatre/theater or cinema.
 * 2)  The total amount of money paid by people worldwide to watch a movie at cinemas/movie theaters.
 * 3)  Quality of an entertainment or spectacle that makes it very popular with the public, or likely to be so.
 * His performance last night was pure box office.
 * His performance last night was pure box office.

Related terms

 * ,  (for train, bus)

Translations

 * Armenian:
 * Catalan:
 * Chinese:
 * Mandarin: ,
 * Finnish: lippukassa, lippumyymälä
 * French: ,
 * Galician: bileteira
 * German: ,
 * Greek:
 * Hungarian:
 * Icelandic:
 * Italian: ,
 * Japanese: 切符売場, 出札所
 * Macedonian: билета́рница, ка́са
 * Norwegian:
 * Bokmål: billettkontor
 * Nynorsk: billettkontor
 * Portuguese:
 * Romanian: casă de bilete
 * Russian: биле́тная ка́сса, ,
 * Spanish:
 * Swedish:
 * Tagalog: takilya
 * Turkish: