A carton is a ready-made container: a carton of milk or juice, an egg carton, and, in shops and warehouses, a box of goods. It isn't the material: the thick, stiff paper that boxes are made of is cardboard, and an everyday box made of it is a cardboard box.
carton: will you get the meaning right?
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a carton of + milk/juice/eggs; a milk/juice + carton; cardboard (not carton) + box/packaging; flatten / recycle + cardboard
- Could you pick up a carton of milk and some eggs on your way home?
- In our office, we collect empty juice cartons for a school recycling project.
- At the hostel breakfast, there were small cartons of apple juice for everyone.
What changed
First versionPlease put the old magazines and carton in the blue recycling bin.
RevisionPlease put the old magazines and cardboard in the blue recycling bin.
The material is cardboard. A carton is a container like a milk carton, so the sentence sounds like “put the old magazines and a milk carton in the bin”. When you're talking about sorting rubbish, the word you need is cardboard.
Thin, stiff cardboard used for greetings cards and crafts is usually called card in British English: Cut a heart out of red card. Cardboard is thicker, and it's used for boxes for parcels and moving house.
Your turn
We packed all our books into big ___ boxes before the move.
Show the answer
cardboard — Boxes for moving house are made of cardboard, so they're cardboard boxes. A carton is the container itself, such as a juice carton, and native speakers don't say carton boxes.
Describe how you sort rubbish at home or at work. Say where you put cardboard and what you do with milk or juice cartons.
At home, I flatten cardboard boxes for the blue bin, and I rinse milk cartons before putting them in with the plastics.
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