telegraph
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈtɛl.ə.ɡɹæf/
ipa: /ˈtɛl.ɪ.ɡɹæf/
rhymes: -æf
Forms: form: telegraphs
Etymology: Borrowed from French télégraphe, equivalent to tele- (“far, distant”) + graph (“writing”), suggested as a new name for Claude Chappe's overland semaphore network by André François Miot de Mélito in place of Chappe's original tachygraphe (“tachygraph, fast writer”).
Senses: examples: text: This strict sense of telegraph developed from French usage for Napoleon's overland semaphore network but rather arbitrarily excludes similar Chinese and other signalling networks.
glosses: Synonym of telegraphy, any process for transmitting arbitrarily long messages over a long distance using a symbolic code.
synonyms: word: telegraphy
word: any process for transmitting arbitrarily long messages over a long distance using a symbolic code
examples: text: The first message transmitted by telegraph in the United States was WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.
text: The Bat—they called him the Bat.[…]. He[…]played a lone hand,[…]. Most lone wolves had a moll at any rate—women were their ruin—but if the Bat had a moll, not even the grapevine telegraph could locate her.
ref: 1920, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Avery Hopwood, chapter I, in The Bat: A Novel from the Play (Dell Book; 241), New York, N.Y.: Dell Publishing Company, →OCLC, page 01:
text: The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative... By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.
ref: 1941, George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius/Part I:
text: When a train has to ascend the incline, it first runs down, engine first, from the station about 60 or 70 yards. Then comes behind it the aforesaid truck, or one similar, which, being attached to an endless wire rope, a communication is made by means of the electric telegraph to the engineman at the top of the incline, when the fixed engine begins to work, and the train, partly pulled by the locomotive before, and partly pushed by the truck behind, rapidly ascends, taking somewhere about three minutes to get up.
ref: 1957 September 24, M. D. Greville and G. O. Holt, “Railway Development in Manchester—1”, in Railway Magazine, page 620, from Herapath's Journal:
text: “Despite the current furore over hacking, which is only a modern term for bugging, eavesdropping, signals intercept, listening-in, tapping, monitoring, there has never been guaranteed privacy since the earliest optical telegraphs to today’s internet,” Packer says. “There never was and never will be privacy.”
ref: 2015 July 15, Thomas McMullan, “The world's first hack: the telegraph and the invention of privacy”, in The Guardian:
glosses: The electrical device gradually developed in the early 19th century to transmit messages (telegrams) using Morse code; the entire system used to transmit its messages including overhead lines and transoceanic cables.
topics: video-games
glosses: A visible or audible cue that indicates to an opponent the action that a character is about to take.
Derived terms: bush telegraph
drum telegraph
electric telegraph
electrotelegraph
engine order telegraph
jungle telegraph
magnetic telegraph
marconigraph
moccasin telegraph
mukluk telegraph
needle telegraph
omnigraph
optical telegraph
pantelegraph
phototelegraph
radiotelegraph
random telegraph noise
telegraph blank
telegraph block
telegraph blue
telegraph board
telegraph boy
telegraph cable
telegraph carriage
telegraph clerk
telegraph clock
telegraph coach
telegraph cock
telegraph code
telegraph company
telegraph cucumber
telegraph dial
telegraph editor
telegrapheme
telegrapher
telegraphese
telegraph form
Telegraph Hill
telegraph house
telegraphic
telegraphical
telegraph instrument
telegraphist
telegraph key
telegraph-like
telegraphlike
telegraph line
telegraph message
telegraph office
telegraphone
telegraph operator
telegraphoscope
telegraph plant
telegraph pole
telegraph post
telegraph reel
telegraph register
telegraph service
telegraph signal
telegraph stamp
telegraph station
telegraph wire
telegraphy
teleiconograph
telepost
teletape
telex
telotype
wireless telegraph
Related terms: heliograph
telegram
teleprinter