Word.ws English Dictionary

sweatbox

sweatbox noun: any box or boxlike structure used to induce sweating, such as of hides or tobacco.

Noun

sweatbox (plural sweatboxes)

  1. Any box or boxlike structure used to induce sweating, such as of hides or tobacco
    • Australia Post has been accused of endangering staff with "sweatbox" uniforms and restricting earlier starts to save money.2009 January 31, Karen Collier, “Posties buckle in scorching heat”, in Herald Sun
  2. (US, slang) A jail cell.
  3. (UK, slang) A compartment in a police van to hold a prisoner being transported.
    • They shoved me in the back of a police van and started driving to the cop shop. I was sitting in the sweatbox, wondering how the Dibble had got onto me so quickly, when I heard a voice from another section of the van say, 'Are you P from Macclesfield?'2013, Colin Blaney, Hotshot: The Story of a Little Red Devil
    • […] she was finally hustled into a sweatbox, as prisoners and prison staff called it, and was off to meet her new home for the foreseeable future.2018, Kerry Barnes, Deceit
  4. A small overheated cell or room used for solitary confinement or torture.
    • In the summer of 1945, one young boy died of heart failure while locked in a sweatbox, a popular corrective at that time.2019, Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Fleet, page 143
    • Don't step in the wrong spot
      You will gеt caught
      When you step in the swеatbox
      They'll make you talk2023, “A Drone Opting Out of the Hive”, performed by Code Orange
  5. (slang) A small nightclub packed to capacity where people get hot and sweaty.
  6. (animation) The room where a scene is reviewed.
  7. (animation) The review process that takes place in a sweat box.

Verb

sweatbox (third-person singular simple present sweatboxes, present participle sweatboxing, simple past and past participle sweatboxed)

  1. (slang, transitive) To place (a person) in a jail cell or a police van compartment.
  2. (transitive, animation) To review (work) in the designated room for such reviews.

Forms of sweatbox

Noun
pluralsweatboxes
Verb
third-person singular presentsweatboxes
present participlesweatboxing
past participlesweatboxed
pastsweatboxed

Origin of sweatbox

From sweat + box.

Questions about sweatbox

What does sweatbox mean?
Sweatbox means any box or boxlike structure used to induce sweating, such as of hides or tobacco.
What part of speech is sweatbox?
Sweatbox can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of sweatbox?
The plural of sweatbox is sweatboxes.

Words near sweatbox in the dictionary

  1. sweatband
  2. sweatbanded
  3. sweatbands
  4. sweatbead
  5. sweatbeads
  6. sweatbox
  7. sweatboxed
  8. sweatboxes
  9. sweatboxing
  10. sweatdrop
  11. sweatdropped

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweatbox (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sweatbox.ogg.

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