Meaning of Telegraph | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Synonym of telegraphy, any process for transmitting arbitrarily long messages over a long distance using a symbolic code.
   uncommon
2. 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.
   historical
3. A visible or audible cue that indicates to an opponent the action that a character is about to take.

Equivalents

Examples

“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.”

“The first message transmitted by telegraph in the United States was WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

““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.””

CEFR level