television
[tel-uh-vizh-uh n]
- the transmission of programming, in the form of still or moving images, via radio waves, cable wires, satellite, or wireless network to a receiver or other screen.
- the process or product involved: to watch television.
- an electronic device or set for receiving television broadcasts or similar programming.
- the field of television broadcasting, or similar transmission of programming.
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Origin of television
Also called TV.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for television
Contemporary Examples
The last film about Martin Luther King was made for television in 1977.
The television networks interrupt their broadcasts to take the nation directly to Selma.
He appears frequently on television as a political commentator.
It is impossible to calculate the full effect that watching this on television, listening on the radio must have had on Sam.
How Martin Luther King Jr. Influenced Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’Peter Guralnick
December 28, 2014
But in a television landscape still so afraid of showing kids that LGBT people exist, it still feels like a missed opportunity.
Historical Examples
And I read the finder scales of the television instrument to him.
Well have to keep out the press and television men, anyway, because of your health.
Martians Never DieLucius Daniel
For television was long since an accomplished, everyday fact.
Together, and silently, Kincaide and I bent over the television disk.
Vampires of SpaceSewell Peaslee Wright
A television set had somehow been turned on by the crash that bulged the back wall.
MoraleMurray Leinster
television
- the system or process of producing on a distant screen a series of transient visible images, usually with an accompanying sound signal. Electrical signals, converted from optical images by a camera tube, are transmitted by UHF or VHF radio waves or by cable and reconverted into optical images by means of a television tube inside a television set
- Also called: television set a device designed to receive and convert incoming electrical signals into a series of visible images on a screen together with accompanying sound
- the content, etc, of television programmes
- the occupation or profession concerned with any aspect of the broadcasting of television programmeshe's in television
- (modifier) of, relating to, or used in the transmission or reception of video and audio UHF or VHF radio signalsa television transmitter
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Abbreviation: TV
Word Origin
C20: from tele- + vision
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Word Origin and History for television
n.
1907, "the action of seeing by means of Hertzian waves or otherwise, what is existing or happening at a place concealed or distant from the observer's eyes" [OED]; in theoretical discussions about sending images by radio transmission, formed in English or borrowed from French télévision, from tele- + vision. Other proposals for the name of this then-hypothetical technology were telephote (1880) and televista (1904). The technology was developed in the 1920s and '30s. Nativized in German as Fernsehen.
Television is the first truly democratic culture -- the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want. [Clive Barnes, "New York Times," Dec. 30, 1969]
Meaning "a television set" is from 1955. Shortened form TV is from 1948.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper