television

Etymology

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vision; first attested in 1900, probably influenced by French télévision from Constantin Perskyi's 1900 paper that was unpublished but presented at a Paris conference.

noun

1. (uncountable) An electronic communication medium that allows the transmission of real-time visual images, and often sound.
   It's a good thing that television doesn't transmit smell.
2. (countable) A device for receiving television signals and displaying them in visual form.
   I have an old television in the study.
3. (uncountable) Collectively, the programs broadcast via the medium of television.
   fifty-seven channels and nothing on television
4. (uncountable, dated) Vision at a distance.
   Half an hour with the manager of Faith Brothers had had the effect of studding the sergeant's habitual simplicity of words and phrases with amazing jewels of technicality. He talked gladly of "lines" and "repeats" and similar profundities, so that Grant had, through his bulk, in a queer television a vivid picture of the manager himself. 1929, Josephine Tey, The Man in the Queue
   […] the magic mirror […] which furnished him television of his family and country 1943, Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Essays on the Greek Romances, Longmans, Green and Co., page 165

verb

1. (neologism, informal) To watch television.