What is the official name for the compartment in front of the passenger seat in a car where people store insurance and registration forms along with other odds and ends (gloves perhaps)?

I’ve always used glove compartment but have heard glove box. I recently heard someone call it a jockey box and that caught me off guard. I wondered if there was an official term for it.

From what I can tell, the official US term is glove compartment and in the UK it’s called the glove box.

According to MSN encarta, the term jockey box is used in the west, especially in the upper Rocky Mountain states, but is recorded as far south as Texas, but it’s also possible that jockey box is the Canadian term, based on this list of British, Canadian and United States vocabulary.

I think I’ll stick with glove box, because it’s the shortest.