A hitbox is an invisible shape commonly used in video games for real-time collision detection. It is often a rectangle (in 2D games) or cuboid (in 3D) that is attached to and follows a point on a visible object (such as a model or a sprite), though circular or spheroidial shapes are also common. It is common for animated objects to have hitboxes attached to each moving part to ensure accuracy during motion.
Hitboxes are used to detect "one-way" collisions such as a character being hit by a punch or a bullet. They are unsuitable for the detection of collisions with feedback (e.g. bumping into a wall) due the difficulty experienced by both humans and AI in managing a hitbox's ever-changing locations; these sorts of collisions are typically handled with much simpler axis-aligned bounding boxes instead. Players may use the term "hitbox" to refer to these types of interactions regardless.