squeeze box

Noun

squeeze box (plural squeeze boxes)

1. (informal) An accordion or concertina.
   • Mama's got a squeeze box she wears on her chest. / From when Daddy comes home, he never gets no rest. / Because she's playing all night, and the music's all right.1975 November, Pete Townshend, “Squeeze Box”, in The Who by Numbers, performed by The Who
   • (Pause. peter picks up his squeeze box.) / peter I sing with this. / george A concertina. / peter No, it's a squeeze box. Can you play it? / george I love music, but can't play a thing.1980, Louis Nowra, “Inside the Island”, in Helen Gilbert, editor, Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, Abingdon, Oxon.; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, published 2001, →ISBN, page 291
2. A box with an adjustable opening used by cavers to practise crawling through tight spaces.
   • At caving conventions aboveground, cavers often squirrel themselves through adjustable wooden "squeeze boxes" in good-natured competitions. In the safety of this controlled setting, cavers may push their capacities far beyond what they might hazard underground; […] A very slender woman's tightest...1998 July, Andrew Todhunter, “Dark Passage: Descending into the Depths of California’s Longest Known Cave”, in The Atlantic Monthly, volume 282, number 1, archived from the original on 21 September...
   • The most notorious squeezes have names: the Gun Barrel, Jam Crack, the Electric Armpit Crawl, Devil's Pinch. You can even train for them by buying a product called a Squeeze Box. It's essentially a play torture chamber for cavers, a wooden box, about thirty by thirty inches, open on the two ends....2003, Barbara Hurd, “The Squeeze”, in Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, →ISBN, page 11
3. A container that fits tightly around an animal to immobilize it for medical treatment, transportation, etc.
   • Jebby rushed to the area behind the mare's paddock. What he saw there filled him with fresh concern. Isabella was in the "squeeze box." This, he knew, was a strait jacket for animals! […] He had seen the old squeeze box sitting in the field behind the hoofed animals' paddock. Zoo keepers had used...1963, Ann Cottrell Free, Forever the Wild Mare, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, →OCLC
   • Williams and Sawyer (1995) reported on successful techniques used on a large number of otters in the rehabilitation centers during the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Restraint equipment included heavy leather welder's gloves with long sleeves, a large salmon dip net fitted with an elongated bag of soft...2001, Pamela Tuomi, “Sea Otters”, in Leslie A. Dierauf, Frances M. D. Gulland, editors, CRC Handbook of Marine Mammal Medicine: Health, Disease, and Rehabilitation, 2nd edition, Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC...
4. Synonym of hugbox (“a therapeutic device”).

   Synonyms:

   hugbox