box office

Meanings

1. A place where tickets are sold in a theatre/theater or cinema.
2. The total amount of money paid by people worldwide to watch a movie at cinemas/movie theaters.
3. Quality of an entertainment or spectacle that makes it very popular with the public, or likely to be so.

Etymology

1786, presumably from sales of boxes, box seats (“separated private seating”). Sense of “total sales” from 1904. Folk etymology is that this derives from Elizabethan theatre, where theater admission was collected in a box attached to a long stick, passed around the audience. However, the term is first attested over a century later (theaters were closed in 1642), making this highly unlikely.