post office box
"post-office-box" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“post office box” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 15
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A uniquely addressable lockable box located on the premises of a post office that may be hired as collection point for mail.
Corpus desk
Index EN-post-office-box · post office box · English
post office box · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 15 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "P" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | post office box |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 15 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “post office box” in English
Rare enough to double-check
post office box is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for post office box in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our dataset records no confusable match here, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
No documented word history exists for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is post office box, spelled P-O-S-T- -O-F-F-I-C-E- -B-O-X.
Definition
- 1A uniquely addressable lockable box located on the premises of a post office that may be hired as collection point for mail.
- 2A test instrument once used by telephone engineers.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how post office box appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
“Rich people use post office boxes to shield themselves from unwanted correspondence. It’s like a garbage can for mail.”
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.