Other forms: terminals
Terminal describes an illness that will end in death — one that no treatment will turn back. A terminal diagnosis, a terminal ward, a friend who is terminally ill and knows it. The word carries the finality with it; there is no softer reading available.
Away from medicine, terminal marks the end of a line in the plain sense. The terminal at an airport is the building where a journey starts and finishes, and a bus terminal is where the route stops for good. In electricity a terminal is the point where a wire connects — the two terminals on a car battery. In computing it is the black window where you type commands, named after the screen-and-keyboard boxes once wired into a mainframe. The adverb terminally also does comic exaggeration: terminally bored, terminally uncool.
1adjectiveterminalOf an illness, certain to cause death; of a person, dying from such an illness.
“The scan came back and the cancer was terminal.”
synonyms: incurable, fatal
2nounbuildingThe building at an airport, port or bus station where passengers arrive and depart.
“Our flight leaves from Terminal 3, which is a shuttle ride from here.”
3nounpointA point at which a wire or cable connects to a battery or circuit.
“Clean the terminals before you try to jump-start it.”
4nounscreenA screen and keyboard, or a window on a computer, used for typing commands directly.
“Open a terminal and type the command exactly as it is written.”
Terminal comes from Latin terminalis, belonging to a boundary or an end, from terminus, a bound or limit — the same terminus that still names the last stop on a railway line. Roman boundary stones were termini: they marked where one man's land stopped and his neighbour's began. Whether the boundary is a field, a railway or a life, terminal is where the thing runs out.
Proto-Indo-European
*terh₂-
Latin
terminālis
English, today
terminal
Borrowed from Latin terminālis. Borrowed from Latin terminalis (“pertaining to a boundary or to the end, terminal, final”), from Latin terminus (“a bound, boundary, limit, end”). See term, terminus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA