shine box
- noun
- Archaic
- The old man set up his shine box on the street corner to offer shoe shining services.
Examples
-
Now go get your fucking shine box.
Blog text (22) -
And that's when I saw her, her little shoe shine box.
-
He grabbed his shine box from the closet before heading out to polish his shoes.
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Every Saturday, I take out my shine box to clean and buff my favorite pair of boots.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a box containing tools and materials for polishing' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'shine' (to polish) with 'box' (a container). This noun–noun compounding follows a regular compositional pattern common across languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Shine box comes from the small box that street shoeshiners carried with polish and brushes. A shoeshiner would put the box on his knee and use the tools to make shoes shine, so the term now means 'a box containing tools for polishing shoes'.