Short for video jockey. A VJ is the person on a music television channel who appears between the music videos to say what you just watched, what is coming next, chat about the band, and read out messages from viewers. The name was built to rhyme with DJ (disc jockey), the person who does the same job on radio with songs. VJ belongs to a particular time — the 1980s to the early 2000s, when MTV and Channel V were how young people found new music — so for many speakers the word now has a nostalgic ring, like calling someone a TV host from that era. There is a second, newer meaning you should know because it is now the commoner one among younger people: a VJ is also the person at a club, concert, or festival who mixes live moving images on the big screens behind the band, the way the DJ mixes sound. Both jobs are written the same way, usually in capitals, and pronounced as two letters, "vee-jay". Which one someone means is nearly always clear from where they are: on television, the first; at a party, the second.