Fax

How to spell fax

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fax

What does fax mean?

1. nounA document or image transmitted electronically over a telephone line, or the machine that sends and receives it.
2. verbTo send a document electronically over a telephone line.

Fax in a sentence

• noun

  The contract arrived by fax just before the deadline.

• verb

  Please fax the signed agreement to head office today.

• noun

  The office still keeps an old fax in the corner for legal forms.

• verb

  The clinic asked the pharmacy to fax the prescription across.

Where does fax come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Fax is a twentieth-century shortening of facsimile, a word that itself came straight from Latin. The Latin phrase fac simile literally meant 'make (it) similar', joining fac, the command form of facere 'to make or do', with simile, the neuter of similis 'like' or 'similar'. From the 1600s English used facsimile to mean an exact copy or reproduction of a document or signature. When the technology for transmitting such copies down a telephone line became common in the 1940s and entered everyday office life later in the century, speakers trimmed the long word down to the brisk single syllable fax. The unusual spelling, with its blunt -ax ending and no trace of the original c, is purely a modern clipping, which is why it looks nothing like its dignified parent facsimile.

How the word is built

• fax (clipped form of facsimile: from Latin fac 'make'
• simile 'similar')