A teletypewriter is the same machine as a teleprinter: a typewriter connected to a wire, so that what someone types in one place prints out on paper in another place far away. This is the American word for it, and Americans shortened it in daily speech to 'teletype' (originally a brand name, Teletype, which became the everyday word — the way people say 'Xerox' for a photocopy). Newsrooms, railways, the military and businesses ran on these machines for decades before fax and email; the clattering of the teletype is a sound in a hundred old films. Today the word survives most strongly in one living place: 'TTY' is short for teletypewriter and means the text phone that deaf and hard-of-hearing people use to type a conversation instead of speaking. You will see 'TTY' on phone numbers for government offices and hospitals in the United States. In computing, 'tty' also became the name for a terminal — a leftover from when the screen you typed at really was one of these machines.

電傳打字機（美式說法，英式叫 teleprinter）。美國口語縮成 teletype；美國政府或醫院電話號碼旁標的「TTY」就是聽障人士用的文字電話。電腦裡的 tty 終端機名稱也是從這台老機器留下來的。