How Big Is a Breadbox?

"Is it bigger than a breadbox?"

Steve Allen is credited with coming up with this question during a 1953 episode of What's My Line, although his original phrasing was, ''Is it a large product if you accept as the norm something the size of a breadbox, let's say?''

"Is it bigger than a breadbox?" was used so much on the show from that point forward that it became a go-to query in guessing games like 20 Questions.

But how big is a breadbox?

I could find one breadbox and tell you that it's the platonic ideal, but that wouldn't be fair to you or the world's breadboxes. Given that we are in the midst of a STATISTICAL REVOLUTION, it's only appropriate that we use advanced mathematics (both addition and division) to solve this problem.

I scoured the Internet's biggest marketplaces to find 20 different breadboxes for this study. In statistical terms, 20 is what's referred to as "a super-huge sample size—maybe too big even for NASA and super computers and stuff."

I was careful to only include real-deal breadboxes. That means no "loaf keepers" or "International Adjustable Bread Keepers"—and certainly no "Bamboo Retro Style Bread Bins." I tallied the height, width, and depth of each of these breadboxes (over fifty-nine different numbers!) and ran them through a series of computer calculations to get the average.

Here it is, the statistics world's holy grail...The Size Of A Breadbox:

8.3375" (Height) x 16.4325" (Width) x 9.28375" (Depth)