Touchscreen

How to spell touchscreen

11 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce touchscreen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does touchscreen mean?

1. nounA display that responds to direct contact from a finger or stylus, used to control a device.

Touchscreen in a sentence

• The ticket machine has a large touchscreen for selecting your journey.

• Smudges on the touchscreen made the phone hard to read in sunlight.

Where does touchscreen come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a modern English compound, joining two much older native words. 'Touch' arrived in the 1200s from the Old French verb 'tochier', meaning to strike or to come into contact with, which itself goes back to a Latin root for striking or sounding. 'Screen' came into English in the 1300s, probably from an Old French or Germanic word for a shield or partition that protected against heat or draughts, later widening to mean any flat surface for projection or display. The two were welded together in the second half of the twentieth century, as engineers developed display panels that could register a finger's contact directly. The word is almost always written as a single solid form, and the only real spelling trap is remembering the double 'c' that 'screen' contributes after the 'tou' of 'touch'.

How the word is built

• touch (to make physical contact)
• screen (a display surface)