Skip to main content
shine box

shine box

1 7.1
A box that holds brushes, cloths, and polish for shoes
  • noun
  • Archaic
translation icon : caja de lustrar
  • 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.

  • Every Saturday, I take out my shine box to clean and buff my favorite pair of boots.

Surface Forms

shine box singular
shine boxes plural

Morphology

shine + box

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'.