blue box

English

Noun

blue box (plural blue boxes)

1. (chiefly British and Canada) A blue container used for the collection of household waste (such as tin cans and newspapers) for recycling by a municipal authority.
2. (historical, telephony) An electronic device used to bypass payment on a tone pulse telephone system.

   Coordinate term: violet box

   • 1998 September, Gary Wolf, “The World According to Woz”, in Wired‎^[1], archived from the original on 2011-08-10:

     This was before Wozniak—known among the cognoscenti as Woz—almost woke up the Pope by calling the Vatican on his famed illegal "blue box," before he invented the Apple II and helped launch the personal computer industry, and before he gave up his brilliant engineering career and became a public school teacher.

3. (informal, US, meteorology) A "tornado watch" notification category.

   See also: severe thunderstorm watch

4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see blue,‎ box.

Hypernyms

• box

Coordinate terms

(colored boxes, especially electronic ones):

• beige box
• black box
• blue box
• brown box
• gray box
• green box
• orange box
• purple box
• red box
• silver box
• white box
• yellow box

References

• blue box on Wikipedia.Wikipedia