- 1電報（那張紙本的電報文）。現在年輕人聽到 Telegram 多半想到的是通訊軟體「電報」App，講舊的要看上下文。
A telegram was a short written message sent quickly over long distance by telegraph — an electrical wire system — long before phones and email were in every home. You went to the post office or telegraph office, wrote your message, and paid by the word. Then the office sent it as electrical signals, and at the other end someone wrote it out and a person carried the paper to the door.
Because you paid for every word, telegrams had a famous style: all the small words thrown away. 'ARRIVING SUNDAY MORNING. MOTHER ILL. SEND MONEY.' No 'I am', no 'the', often the word STOP instead of a full stop, because was hard to send. English speakers still call this style 'telegraphic'.
Telegrams carried the biggest news of people's lives — a birth, a death, a soldier not coming home — so in old films and novels a telegram arriving at the door is a moment of fear or great joy. That feeling still sits inside the word.
In most countries the service is now dead; it ended in the US in 2006 and in India in 2013. So today the word is history, or a picture from an old story. There is a rare verb too — 'she telegrammed him the news' — but even when telegrams existed, 'to wire someone' was the more common way to say it.
One warning for young : Telegram is now much better known as a phone messaging app. The app was named after the old thing, and its logo is a paper plane — a message flying far. Same word, completely different object.
組成tele- + -gram. 'tele-' is Greek for 'far'. '-gram' is Greek for 'something written, a written thing' — from the same root as 'graph' (to write, to scratch). So a telegram is a writing from far away. Compare 'telegraph', which is the machine and the system: tele- + -graph, 'far-writer'. The -gram is the message; the -graph is the writer.
同家族的字
- telegraphthe machine that sent the telegram — tele- 'far' + -graph 'write'
- diagramsame -gram 'thing written/drawn'
- programsame -gram — literally something written up beforehand
- grammarfrom the same Greek root for writing
- photographshares -graph 'write' — writing with light
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Telegramname
- 1
An encrypted, cloud-based instant messaging service.
- Following his arrest, Telegram said Durov had “nothing to hide” and that it was “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”
Telegramnoun
- 1
A Telegram channel.
- Does anyone have the Telegram link?
Telegramverb
- 1
informalTo send a message using the Telegram instant messaging service.
telegramnoun/ˈtɛləˌɡɹæm/
- 1
A message transmitted by telegraph.
- There is an hour or two, after the passengers have embarked, which is disquieting and fussy.[…]Passengers wander restlessly about or hurry, with futile energy, from place to place. Pushing men hustle each other at the windows of the purser's office, under pretence of expecting letters or despatching telegrams.
- On 20 May 1937 when down in Bradford-on-Avon on business, Bulleid received a telegram with the cryptic news: 'Sir Herbert Walker wishes to see you twelve thirty tomorrow—Gresley'.
telegramverb/ˈtɛləˌɡɹæm/
- 1
To send a telegram.
- In the brouhaha over the reappointment of Superior Court Judge Sylvia Pressler, we organized massive support - telegramming, telephoning and writing to encourage the State Senate to exercise its advise and consent function responsibly.
- He was a very posh chap from Oxfordshire, whose dad had been Chancellor and whose mum was obliged to keep telegramming round to find him a job because little Winnie had flunked out of his very expensive school.
- 2
To send a telegram to (a person).
- So when King – who had been in Atlanta for “Bloody Sunday” – telegrammed Parks about returning to Alabama to take part in a third mass march from Selma to Montgomery, her immediate answer was “Why, of course.”
- 3
To send (a message) in a telegram.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。