box office

Meaning

Noun

• A place where tickets are sold in a theatre/theater or cinema.
• The total amount of money paid by people worldwide to watch a movie at cinemas/movie theaters.
• Quality of an entertainment or spectacle that makes it very popular with the public, or likely to be so.

Origin

• 1786, presumably from sales of box, box seats. Sense of “total sales” from 1904.
• Folk etymology is that this derives from Elizabethan theatre, 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.