Picture a small lit window beside the doors of a theatre, with a queue in front of it and a drawer of money behind it. Everyone who wants to get in has to stop at that window first. One way to hold the whole phrase is to stand at that window and look in three directions: at the window itself, at the money piling up inside it, and at whatever it is out on the stage that makes the queue long in the first place.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary dates the phrase to 1786 and says it presumably comes from the sale of boxes, that is box seats, the separated private seating in a theatre. The sense of total ticket sales is dated to 1904. Wiktionary also records, and rejects, the popular story that the phrase comes from Elizabethan theatres collecting admission in a box on a stick: the term is first attested more than a century after those theatres closed in 1642.
Wiktionary 記載這個詞大約在 1786 年出現，很可能來自賣「box」也就是劇院包廂座位的地方；「總票房」那個意思要到 1904 年才出現。另外有一個流傳很廣的說法，講它來自伊莉莎白時代拿著錢箱收門票的做法，Wiktionary 認為不可信：當時的劇院在 1642 年就關了，而這個詞要一百多年後才有紀錄。
Wiktionary, "box office"
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
box officenoun/ˈbɒksˌɒfɪs/
- 1
broadcastingentertainmentfilmA place where tickets are sold in a theatre/theater or cinema.
- The movie tanked at the box office.
- 2
broadcastingfilmmediaThe total amount of money paid by people worldwide to watch a movie at cinemas/movie theaters.
- box office receipts
- If any further insurance was required, the popularity of the three "Topper" films in the 1930s — based on Thorne Smith's characters — would seem to indicate that amusing ghosts made good box office.
- 3
Quality of an entertainment or spectacle that makes it very popular with the public, or likely to be so.
- His performance last night was pure box office.
- A show that makes great box office.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。