the.com/penalty box

means A sin bin at the side of a hockey rink where a player sits out a set number of minutes as punishment for breaking the rules, usually for violence that would be a felony anywhere else.

from Straight compound of 'penalty' (from Latin 'poena,' meaning punishment, the same root giving us 'pain') and 'box,' the literal enclosed stall built into the rink's boards. It's a late-19th/early-20th-century hockey-rulebook term — once the sport formalized penalties for infractions like tripping or fighting, it needed a literal place to put the offender, and 'penalty box' described exactly that with no metaphor required. The phrase later escaped hockey into general slang for any figurative timeout — being 'in the penalty box' with your boss or your spouse — borrowing the rink's humiliation without the stitches.