Televised

How to spell televised

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce televised

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does televised mean?

1. verbBroadcast or shown by means of television.

Televised in a sentence

• The final match was televised live to millions of viewers.

• The leaders took part in a televised debate before the election.

Where does televised come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a modern hybrid, built from the Greek prefix tele-, meaning 'far off' or 'at a distance', and the Latin root vis, from videre, 'to see', so the literal idea is 'seen from afar'. The base verb 'televise' was coined in the early twentieth century as a back-formation from 'television', the name given to the new technology of transmitting moving pictures over distance. 'Television' itself first appeared around 1907, stitching the Greek and Latin halves together despite the old scholarly preference for keeping a word's two parts from the same language. The form 'televised' is simply the past tense and past participle, recorded from the 1920s and 1930s as broadcasting spread. The same tele- shows up in 'telephone' (far sound), 'telescope' (far seeing), and 'telegraph' (far writing), while the vis root sits inside 'vision', 'visible', and 'supervise'.

How the word is built

• tele- (far, at a distance)
• vis (see, from Latin videre)
• -ed (past tense/adjective suffix)