billboard

Etymology

From bill + board.

noun

1. A very large outdoor sign, generally used for advertising.
   The land refuses to change. The more he drives the more the region resembles the country around Mt. Judge. The same scruff on the embankments, the same weathered billboards for the same products you wondered anybody would ever want to buy. 1960, John Updike, 'Rabbit, Run', page 31
   All America was on the verge of spring and the countryside was coming to glory, what we could see of the countryside through the smoke and billboards. 1971, Don DeLillo, Americana, Penguin, published 2006, Part 1, Chapter 5, p. 111
   Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. 1977, Susan Sontag, “Melancholy Objects”, in On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 71
2. (dated) A flat surface, such as a panel or fence, on which bills are posted; a bulletin board.
   When a show leaves New York, it carries posters wherewith to embellish each fence and bill board in the land … 1902, “The Casual Club”, in The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2, 28 May, 1902
   Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name “Camille.” 1918, Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Book 3, Chapter 3, p. 308
   Until the recent rash of North London line maps appeared on station billboards in the London area of BR, the service undoubtedly suffered from meagre and ineffectual publicity. 1964 July, “News and Comment: The Broad Street-Richmond line”, in Modern Railways, page 17
3. (nautical) A piece of thick plank, armed with iron plates, and fixed on the bow or fore-channels of a vessel, for the bill or fluke of the anchor to rest on.
4. (computer graphics) A sprite that always faces the screen, no matter which direction it is looked at from.