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barcode

UK/ˈbɑː.kəʊd/US/ˈbɑɹ.koʊd/
nounB1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: barcodes

A barcode is the black stripes on a product that the till scans. Scan the barcode.

The stripes encode a number and nothing else, since the price is looked up from that number. A barcode was first used commercially in 1974 on a packet of chewing gum.

toguro · CC0

Definitions of barcode

  1. 1nounbarcodeThe black stripes on a product that the till scans with a beep.B1

    “The barcode would not scan and the whole queue waited.”

barcode is a code.

Where it comes from

Bar plus code, from the pattern of bars; the system was patented in 1952 and used from 1974.

bar + code. 1963 for Q856.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Shopping & Money

Practise this word

barcode in the wild

  • The Universal Product Code (UPC or UPC code) is a barcode symbology that is used worldwide for tracking trade items in stores.

    Universal Product Code

  • The international GS1 organisation assigns the digits used for both the UPC and the related International Article Number (EAN) barcode.

    Universal Product Code

  • A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable symbolic form.

    Barcode

  • Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines.

    Barcode

  • Code 39 is a variable length, discrete barcode symbology defined in ISO/IEC 16388:2023.

    Code 39

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.