off the air

1. Not being broadcast, as in Once they knew they were off the air, the panelists burst out laughing. This idiom, along with the antonym on the air (“being broadcast”), dates from the 1920s, air being considered a medium for radio-wave transmission.

Example Sentences

But then it steadied, and soon Ridge looked like a program that was about to go off the air.

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“Caesar’s Hour” went off the air that year, and its star went into physical decline.

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At television stations, which normally went off the air overnight, executives considered the radical idea of broadcasting news twenty-four hours a day.

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Tapper became irate and rushed her off the air after she mentioned Biden’s “cognitive decline.”

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Maybe it’s time to revive the old, possibly apocryphal Red Auerbach legends about fire alarms and turning off the air conditioning.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal