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

During a search of the vehicle, law enforcement found a shoebox that had 5,296 pills containing meth — with a weight of about two kilos. —Rick Sobey, Boston Herald, 26 Nov. 2025

City slickers will definitely get a bang for their buck with this place, which is a lot more spacious than a shoebox on the Upper East Side. —Madeleine Marr, Miami Herald, 17 Nov. 2025

Memory Box One of my personal ways to use old shoeboxes is to turn them into a memory box. —Ashlyn Needham, Southern Living, 25 Oct. 2025

Cubesats, compact spacecraft usually no bigger than a shoebox, have helped transform the landscape of space research in the past 20 years. —Kenna Hughes-Castleberry, Space.com, 21 Oct. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1838, in the meaning defined at sense 1