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contactless

adjectiveB1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — contact sits at #604Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Contactless means paid by touching a card against a reader. Pay contactless, a contactless limit, contactless only.

The card and the reader talk over a few centimetres, and the short range is the security. A contactless limit exists because no signature or number is asked for.

Definitions of contactless

  1. 1adjectivecontactlessPaid by touching a card against a reader.B1

    “The whole shop is contactless and takes no cash at all.”

contactless is a quality.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *teh₂g-

  2. Latin

    contactus

  3. English

    contact

  4. English, today

    contactless

Built from

  • contingō · Latin — to touch on all sides
  • tangō · Latin — to touch

From contact + -less. contact comes from Latin contactus, from contingō (“to touch on all sides”), from tangō (“to touch”). Used in English since the 17th century.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Bank & Post Office

Practise this word

contactless in the wild

  • ISO/IEC 14443 is called contactless short-range standard with a higher RF speed compared to some other RFID standard such as ISO/IEC 15693.

    ISO/IEC 14443

  • A standard Oyster card is a blue credit-card-sized stored-value contactless smart card.

    Oyster card

  • From September 2007 to 2010, the Oyster card functionality was tried as an experiment on Barclaycard contactless bank cards.

    Oyster card

  • FeliCa is a contactless RFID smart card system from Sony in Japan, primarily used in electronic money cards.

    FeliCa

  • A contactless smart card is a contactless credential whose dimensions are credit card size.

    Contactless smart card

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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.

Related words

the tangō family

contacttaste

contactless — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others