remote

Pluralremotes

Formsremotes, remoting, remoted

1. 1
   adjective

   Far away in space, or otherwise difficult to reach.

   The expedition spent weeks crossing some of the most remote terrain on the continent.

   Supplies are flown in because the outpost is too remote for trucks.

   Similardistant, faraway, far-off, far, outlying

   Oppositenear, close

   Note

   Distance here is a matter of reach as much as miles. An outpost is remote when it is hard to get to, and a general sent there after losing the emperor's favor has been pushed away from power as well as from the capital. Both ways of comparing are standard: remoter and remotest sit beside more remote and most remote, so the remotest valley and the most remote valley are equally correct.

2. 2
   adjective

   Set at a distance and separated from what surrounds it.

   Their farm lies remote from the nearest town, with miles of empty road between.

   The two events are remote from each other in time, separated by nearly a century.

   Similarwireless, disconnected

   Oppositeconnected, attached, direct

   Note

   The word carries its Latin past in plain sight: remotus was the past participle of removere, "to remove", from re- and movere, "to move", so what is remote has been moved away. Often the distance is a working one, as with a remote operator steering a vehicle by wireless handset, or remote workers who are not on site. Its opposites, connected, direct, contiguous and presential, all mean being there in person.

3. 3
   nounabbreviationellipsis

   Short form of remote control.

   The remote needs new batteries again.

   She pointed the remote at the screen and hit mute.

   Note

   A clipped noun: the modifier stays and the head noun control drops away, so a word that once only described now names the object itself. It answers to the countable device, the remote someone hogs from the best chair or points at the screen. It does not cover the uncountable idea of a means of operating something from a distance.

4. 4
   adjective

   Very slight; faint or only barely possible.

   The doctors said the risk of complications was remote.

   There remains a remote possibility that the original document still survives.

   Similarslight, faint, small, distant

   Oppositegreat, considerable

   Note

   Likelihood is where this sense mostly lives: a remote possibility, a remote chance, a very remote chance of winning. It also stretches to likeness, so a remote resemblance is a faint echo rather than an unlikely event. Unlike the "hard to reach" meaning, it measures degree rather than place, which is why it pairs so readily with very and only.

5. 5
   adjective

   Emotionally distant; cool and not engaged with the people around one.

   The manager stayed remote with his staff, rarely sharing anything personal.

   After the loss she grew remote, withdrawing from even her closest friends.

   Similardistant, aloof, withdrawn, cool, reserved

   Oppositeintimate, involved, passionate

6. 6
   nouncountable

   A piece of broadcast programming that originates away from the station's or show's control room.

   The station scheduled a remote from the festival grounds for Saturday night.

   Engineers ran cables for the remote along the parade route.

   Note

   In broadcasting talk the adjective becomes a countable noun for a whole location job. A station schedules a remote from the festival grounds, and engineers run cables for it along a parade route. The reference point is always the control room, and anything produced away from it, live or recorded, counts. Outside broadcasting, the remote is far more likely to mean the handheld control.

7. 7
   verbintransitive

   To connect to a computer from a distant location, typically over a network.

   Technicians remote into the system overnight to apply patches.

   She remoted into the lab computer to run the analysis from home.

   Similarconnect

   Note

   A verb made straight from the adjective, and it travels with into: you remote into a server or a lab machine. It inflects regularly as remotes, remoting and remoted. Bill English's Microsoft Sharepoint 2010: Administrator's Companion (2010) already sets remoting into a server against running commands locally, which is exactly the contrast the verb exists to draw.

8. 8
   nouncountable

   A version-control repository hosted on another machine rather than on your local computer.

   She pushed the latest commits to the remote before logging off.

   The team keeps a backup remote on a separate server in another region.

   Note

   Version control has given the word a second noun life. The remote is the shared copy on another machine, the one that local clones push commits to and pull changes from. A project can keep more than one, so it takes an article and a plural like any countable noun. Its counterpart is the local repository on your own computer.

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