Television

How to spell television

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce television

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does television mean?

1. nounA device or broadcast system for receiving and displaying moving pictures with sound.

Television in a sentence

• The new television barely fit on the living room wall.

• Millions watched the final on television that evening.

Where does television come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Television is a hybrid coinage that stitches together two ancient languages: the Greek prefix tele-, meaning 'far' or 'at a distance' (the same element found in telephone and telescope), and the Latin verb videre, 'to see', whose stem vis- also gives us 'vision' and 'visible'. Put together, the word literally means 'seeing at a distance', a neat description of the technology. It first appeared around 1900, credited to the Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi, who used the French form télévision at a conference in Paris, and the English word followed soon after. The mixing of a Greek prefix with a Latin root was criticised by purists at the time, yet the convenient word stuck. The spelling trap is the middle: the unstressed -vis- can be hard to pin down, and learners sometimes slip an extra letter in, but remembering the buried word 'vision' keeps it straight.

How the word is built

• tele- (Greek: far, distant)
• vis (Latin: see)
• -ion (noun suffix)