Word.ws English Dictionary

tickey box

tickey box noun: a payphone.

Noun

tickey box (plural tickey boxes)

  1. (South Africa, slang) A payphone.
    • […] He phones his mother in Hopetown every afternoon from the tickey box in the hostel.'2002, Michiel Heyns, The Children's Day, Jonathan Ball Publishers, published 2002, →ISBN, page 81
    • “Come with us. Father may even have some coins for another tickey box. One that works,” Vusi said with mirth.2018, Kate S. Richards, Trainsurfer

Forms of tickey box

pluraltickey boxes
alternative formtickey-box
alternative formticky box
alternative formticky-box

Origin of tickey box

From tickey, obsolete South African slang for a threepenny coin (the cost of a payphone call at the time of the term's origin), and box (telephone kiosk).

Questions about tickey box

What does tickey box mean?
Tickey box means a payphone.
What part of speech is tickey box?
Tickey box is a noun.
What is the plural of tickey box?
The plural of tickey box is tickey boxes.

Words near tickey box in the dictionary

  1. ticketty-boo
  2. tickety boo
  3. tickety-boo
  4. ticketyboo
  5. tickey
  6. tickey box
  7. tickey boxes
  8. tickey-box
  9. tickey-boxes
  10. tickeys
  11. Tickhill

Source and license

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