shoebox

noun

shoe·​box ˈshü-ˌbäks 

variants or less commonly shoe box

1

: a box that shoes are sold in

a shoebox full of old photographs

2

: a small space and especially a small living space

The loft, almost an hour from her house by tube, is a shoebox with 18-foot ceilings, white and blue, with odds and ends of mismatched furniture …

—Michael Kimmelman

—often used before another noun

a shoebox apartment

Since commercial real estate was cheaper, art galleries and Off Off Off Broadway theaters could spring up in shoebox storefronts.

—James Wolcott

Examples of shoebox in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Police who responded to the home allegedly found empty bags of heroin on the floor of the room where the boy was found, according to prosecutors, and a shoebox containing hundreds of bags containing blue fentanyl and bags that were either empty or contained heroin residue. —Liam Quinn, Peoplemag, 5 June 2024

Virtue Restaurant Virtue serves shoebox lunches in boxes adorned with drawings and history, courtesy of Patrick Coleman in Michigan. —Jaha Nailah Avery, Condé Nast Traveler, 24 Mar. 2023

Across the hall was the shoemakers’ shop, lined floor to ceiling with cardboard shoeboxes. —Julie Orringer, Travel + Leisure, 14 May 2024

His son Orson found the shoebox of 13 tapes, interviews about her life that the Italian German secretly recorded in New York in the 1990s. —Marissa Charles, Peoplemag, 2 May 2024

Fifteen foster children had already come through their home when Brittany and Chris Tyler heard about a three-and-a-half pound, two-day-old infant left in a Nike shoebox at a Louisville fire station. —Maggie Menderski, The Courier-Journal, 12 Mar. 2024

Notably also in Michigan, a man who lived in the same house as a 6-year-old boy who shot and killed classmate Kayla Rolland in 2000 was charged and pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for leaving the gun accessible to the child in a shoebox. —Gina Kaufman, USA TODAY, 1 Feb. 2024

There wasn't a baby box at 3228 River Park Drive, so Samuel's biological mother wrapped him in a blanket and placed him in a Nike shoebox just at shift change at the fire station. —Maggie Menderski, The Courier-Journal, 12 Mar. 2024

In a harrowing essay for The Cut, freelance finance writer Charlotte Cowles details how she was manipulated into putting $50,000 in a shoebox and handing it to a stranger in a white Mercedes on the instructions of someone who claimed to be a CIA agent. —Andrew Couts, WIRED, 17 Feb. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1838, in the meaning defined at sense 1