Other forms: billboards
A billboard is the giant advertising board beside a road, sized to be read from a moving car. A face four metres wide, a phone number, a burger lit up at night on the ring road.
In British English the everyday word is hoarding, and billboard is the American one that has spread almost everywhere. It takes the verbs you would expect: a billboard goes up, comes down, or gets plastered with a new campaign overnight. Billboard advertising is the outdoor half of a marketing budget, and a billboard campaign is the whole run of them across a city. A digital billboard is the screen version that changes every few seconds. One warning: Billboard is also the American music magazine whose charts decide what counts as a hit, so number one on the Billboard chart has nothing to do with roadside adverts.
1nounbillboardA large outdoor board carrying advertisements, put up where traffic passes.
“A billboard beside the motorway advertised a hotel forty miles away.”
synonyms: hoarding
billboard is an advertising board.
Billboard is two plain English words pushed together: bill and board. A bill is a printed public notice — the sense still standing in the old sign post no bills — and the board is the flat surface it was pasted onto. The giant roadside version is that same idea with the volume turned all the way up.
From bill + board.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in In the City, Marketing & Advertising