Word.ws English Dictionary

blue box

blue box noun: a blue container used for the collection of household waste (such as tin cans and newspapers) for recycling by a municipal authority. Also the ellipsis of USPS blue box.

Noun

blue box (plural blue boxes)

  1. (Canada, UK) A blue container used for the collection of household waste (such as tin cans and newspapers) for recycling by a municipal authority.
  2. (historical) An electronic device used to bypass payment on a tone pulse telephone system.
    • This was before Wozniak—known among the cognoscenti as Woz—almost woke up the Pope by calling the Vatican on his famed illegal "blue box," before he invented the Apple II and helped launch the personal computer industry, and before he gave up his brilliant engineering career and became a public...1998 September, Gary Wolf, “The World According to Woz”, in Wired, archived from the original on 10 Aug 2011
  3. (US, informal) A "tornado watch" notification category.
    • See also: severe thunderstorm watch
  4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see blue, box.

Also used as

blue box is also the ellipsis of USPS blue box.

Forms of blue box

pluralblue boxes

Questions about blue box

What does blue box mean?
Blue box means a blue container used for the collection of household waste (such as tin cans and newspapers) for recycling by a municipal authority.
What part of speech is blue box?
Blue box is a noun.
What is the plural of blue box?
The plural of blue box is blue boxes.

Words near blue box in the dictionary

  1. blue book exams
  2. blue books
  3. blue bottle
  4. blue bottle experiment
  5. blue bottles
  6. blue box
  7. blue boxes
  8. blue boxing
  9. blue bubble
  10. blue bugle
  11. blue bugles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blue box (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “blue box.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blue_box. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.