means the act of opening a newly purchased product from its packaging, often filmed and shared as a kind of performance for an audience

from A plain compound of "box" plus the prefix "un-" (Old English on-, signaling reversal or removal) and the "-ing" of ongoing action — so literally "the taking-out-of-the-box." The word "box" itself traces back through Old English to Late Latin buxis, from Greek pyxis, a container originally made of boxwood. "Unboxing" in its modern sense is an early-2000s internet coinage, born when people started filming themselves opening new gadgets and posting it online — turning a private moment into a genre.