telescreen

[tel-uh-skreen]

noun

1. a television screen, especially a large one suitable for viewing by large numbers of people.

Word History and Origins

Origin of telescreen¹

First recorded in 1940–45; tele(vision) + screen

Example Sentences

Orwell described her as “a rebel from the waist down,” and Newman gives her a slightly smutty history in the Ministry’s pornographic section, where she appeased the lower ranks with titles including “Inner Party Sinners: ‘My Telescreen Is Broken, Comrade!’”

Read more on Los Angeles Times

Thomas Boswell was the only sportswriter to bring me to tears — on Carl Yastrzemski’s last season, watching his younger self on the Fenway telescreen, alone in the dugout at Fenway during a rain delay; or sharing a “eureka” moment from County Stadium watching the O’s finesse pitcher change speeds; or assessing our mortality: “In the game of life we all lose, eventually.”

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Everyone who is anyone must have a "telescreen", through which Big Brother can watch them.

Read more on BBC

But there is a hint in the story that these devices were originally something people chose to buy: when the duplicitous Mr Charrington needs to give Winston a believable reason for the apparent lack of a telescreen in his spare room, he says they were "too expensive", and "I never seemed to feel the need of it".

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Behind them all looms the “never-sleeping ear” of George Orwell’s telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.”

Read more on The Guardian