Mailbox

How to spell mailbox

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mailbox

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mailbox mean?

1. nounA box for receiving or posting letters and parcels.
2. nounAn electronic folder that stores a person's incoming email messages.

Mailbox in a sentence

• The courier left the parcel beside the mailbox by the front gate.

• His work mailbox was full, so new messages bounced back to senders.

• She checked the mailbox every afternoon for the bank statement.

• The system gives each new employee a personal mailbox on the first day.

Where does mailbox come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a compound of two much older words. The first part, 'mail', comes from the Old French 'male', which meant a leather bag or travelling pouch; it entered English in the 1200s and originally referred to the bag in which letters were carried rather than the letters themselves. Over the centuries the sense shifted from the bag to its contents, so 'mail' came to mean the post itself. The second part, 'box', traces back through Old English to the Latin 'buxus', the boxwood tree whose hard wood was carved into small containers. Joined together in the nineteenth century, 'mailbox' first named the receptacle that holds delivered post, and in the late twentieth century the word was naturally reused for the electronic inbox that stores email.

How the word is built

• mail (postal letters, from Old French male: a travelling bag)
• box (a container)