A video cassette recorder — the box that sat under the television before DVDs existed. You pushed a fat plastic cassette of tape into it, and it could do two things: play a film you had bought or rented, and record a TV programme while you were out so you could watch it later. That second thing was the reason people loved it; before the VCR, if you missed a programme, it was simply gone. The machine belongs to roughly the 1980s and 1990s, so today the word carries a strong smell of that time, and young people mostly meet it in films rather than in life. In Britain people more often said "video" or "the video recorder" for the same machine, so VCR sounds slightly more American; both are understood everywhere. Say it letter by letter: vee-see-arr. The plural is VCRs, no apostrophe. Note that the machine is the VCR, the tape you put in it is a videotape or a video cassette — a small distinction that matters when you read old writing.