Telegraph

How to spell telegraph

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce telegraph

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does telegraph mean?

1. nounA system or device for transmitting messages over a distance using coded electrical signals along wires.
2. verbTo send a message to someone by telegraph, or to signal an intention unintentionally in advance.

Telegraph in a sentence

• noun

  The message arrived by telegraph within the hour.

• verb

  The captain would telegraph the harbour office before each departure.

• noun

  The old telegraph in the railway office still had its brass key.

• verb

  A boxer must not telegraph a punch if he wants it to land.

Where does telegraph come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: tele, meaning 'far off' or 'at a distance', and graphein, meaning 'to write'. Put together the literal sense is 'writing at a distance', a perfect description of a machine that carried messages across great spaces. The compound was actually assembled in French as telegraphe in the 1790s, originally for Claude Chappe's system of signalling towers with movable arms, before it came to mean the electrical instrument that sent coded pulses along wires. English adopted it almost immediately, and the same tele- prefix later seeded a whole family of distance words such as telephone, television, and telescope. The graph element, shared with photograph and autograph, is also why a great many newspapers around the world took the name, presenting themselves as carriers of news from afar.

How the word is built

• tele- (far, at a distance)
• graph (to write or record)