Word.ws English Dictionary

cheese box

cheese box noun: a device formerly used by phreakers to convert a home telephone line into a payphone. Also the alternative form of cheesebox.

Noun

cheese box (plural cheese boxes)

  1. A device formerly used by phreakers to convert a home telephone line into a payphone.
    • Then the bookie leaves the site of the phone and stations himself blocks away in another room with a phone attached to a similar cheese box.1967, William Surface, Inside Internal Revenue
    • The cheese box bridges two separate telephone lines. It is often used by bookmakers and bettors to place free calls for accepting or placing bets.1978, Bell telephone magazine, volumes 57-58

Also used as

cheese box is also the alternative form of cheesebox.

Forms of cheese box

pluralcheese boxes

Origin of cheese box

(phreaking device): The device could originally be fitted into a wooden box intended for cheese. Compare blue box.

Questions about cheese box

What does cheese box mean?
Cheese box means a device formerly used by phreakers to convert a home telephone line into a payphone.
What part of speech is cheese box?
Cheese box is a noun.
What is the plural of cheese box?
The plural of cheese box is cheese boxes.

Words near cheese box in the dictionary

  1. cheese antenna
  2. cheese antennae
  3. cheese antennas
  4. cheese ball
  5. cheese balls
  6. cheese box
  7. cheese boxes
  8. cheese bus
  9. cheese buses
  10. cheese busses
  11. cheese button

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cheese 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: “cheese box.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cheese_box. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.