Other forms: televisions
A television is the screen in the living room where you watch films and programmes. The thing all the chairs point at.
The word covers both the set and the whole medium: a new television in the corner, and a career in television. British English shortens it to telly in speech and TV in writing, and both are commoner than the full word. It brought a shelf of compounds with it — television licence, television series, reality television. The parts mean far-seeing, from Greek tele for distant and Latin visio for sight.
1nountelevisionA device with a screen for watching broadcast programmes.~7%
“The television was on with the sound turned down.”
2nounmediumThe medium or the industry of broadcasting.~93%
“She has worked in television for twenty years.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: tv, telly
Proto-Indo-European
*weyd-
French
télévision
English, today
television
From tele- + vision; first attested in 1900, probably influenced by French télévision from Constantin Perskyi's 1900 paper that was unpublished but presented at a Paris conference.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA