pillbox

plural pillboxes · alternative pill-box

1. A small box in which pills are kept.

   There is a list of possessions auctioned after her death – her pillboxes and playing cards, two silver-mounted ivory lemon-squeezers.

   2018 August 2, Parul Sehgal, “Beauty, bad temper and scandal in a riveting look at Princess Margaret”, in The Bellingham Herald, volume 130, number 214, Bellingham, Wash., page 15T, column 2

2. governmentA flat, concrete gun emplacement.

   Beneath the wide steppe sky women in white kerchiefs were digging trenches and building small pillboxes, looking up now and again in case 'those vermin' were on the wing.

   2019, Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler and Yury Bit-Yunan, Stalingrad, page 226

   2 more examples

   It was reported that the Germans had established trench works in front of the pillboxes. The enemy was said to have taken refuge from American fire in the pillboxes, later emerging to take up the trench positions.

   1944 December 19, “Germans Stiff in Southern Reich”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, page 4

   "For the first time in 125 years a powerful enemy was now established across the narrow waters of the English Channel. ... Many people must have been bewildered by the innumerable activities all around them. They could understand the necessity for wiring and mining the beaches, the anti-tank obstacles at the defiles, the concrete pillboxes at the cross-roads, the intrusions into their houses to fill an attic with sandbags, on to their golf-courses or most fertile fields and gardens to burrow out some wide anti-tank ditch." So wrote Winston Churchill in Their Finest Hour, published in 1949.

   2023 November 15, Dr Joseph Brennan, “A crucial part of our nation's defences”, in RAIL, number 996, page 60

3. archaicslangA doctor's carriage.

   […] the commercial traveller cuts in and out of the line in the dog-cart that carries his samples; the doctor contrives to be seen there in his pill-box on wheels; the eminent tragedian airs himself in a buggy; […]

   1863, Elizabeth Caroline Grey, Good Society; Or, Contrasts of Character, page 5

   1 more example

   The doctor generously told him where he lived in a loud and audible manner, gave him half-a-crown, and was about ascending his pill-box, after bidding him call upon him, in a day or two, when a servant in a splendid livery stepped forward from the hotel […]

   1838, Oasis: An Anthology to Divert an Idle Hour, volume 1, page 9