terminal
Pluralterminals
Pluralterminals
Formsterminals
- 1A building at an airport where passengers move from ground transportation to the gates and facilities that let them board planes.
Passengers arriving at the terminal followed the signs toward the security checkpoint.
The airport's second terminal handles all of its international departures.
- 2A device for entering data into a computer or communication system and displaying data received, typically equipped with a keyboard and a textual display.
The clerk entered each booking on a terminal connected to the central database.
Every terminal in the room showed the same data fed from the mainframe.
Similarconsole, workstation
Note
Computing borrowed the word for the place where a person meets the machine: a keyboard for input and a text display for output. Historically this was a separate unit wired to a mainframe, not a computer in its own right, so every screen in the room showed what the central system sent. That history explains why the software version kept the name.
- 3Of a disease or condition, certain to cause death; fatal.
After the diagnosis turned out to be terminal, she chose to travel while she still could.
The clinic specializes in caring for patients with terminal illnesses.
Similarfatal, incurable, deadly
Note
The medical adjective applies to an illness or to the person who has it, as in terminal cancer, a terminal illness or a terminal patient. It describes a prognosis rather than a degree of severity. A serious condition may be survived, but a terminal one is expected to end in death rather than recovery.
- 4A railroad station where train service begins and ends; the end of the line.
Every train on the route returns to the terminal at the end of its run.
The old railway terminal downtown has been converted into a museum.
Similarterminus
Note
Of all the senses, the end-of-the-line station stays closest to the Latin. The word comes from Late Latin terminalis, "pertaining to a boundary or to the end", from terminus, "a bound, limit, end". A terminal station is where the line stops and service turns back, which is why the name sits on buildings such as Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Term and terminus come from the same root.
- 5The end of a wire or cable where signals or power are transmitted or received, or a point along it where they are made available; also the hardware fixed there to fasten connections.
The technician tightened the loose wire on the output terminal.
Signals leave the device through a single terminal at the end of the cable.
Note
Electricians and engineers use the word for the point where a conductor meets the outside world. It names the place, either the end of a wire or a tap along its length, and also the hardware fixed there to take a connection, such as a lug, post or screw block. Terminals are often named by their role, as in an output terminal. A battery's contacts are one familiar case of the same idea.
- 6A harbor facility where ferries take on and let off passengers and load and unload vehicles.
Cars lined up at the terminal long before the ferry arrived.
The new ferry terminal can load two ships at once.
- 7
- 8A computer program that imitates a physical terminal, providing a text interface for typing commands and viewing output.
Developers often keep a terminal open beside their code editor.
He connected to the remote server through a terminal on his desktop.
Note
Software that keeps the old hardware's habits. It is a window that presents a text interface to a shell or a remote host. It interprets control sequences and draws character output much as the keyboard-and-screen device once did. The program is called an emulator because it reproduces a physical machine's behavior rather than inventing its own.
- 9
- 10Occurring at the end of a word, sentence, or stretch of time, and serving to bring it to a close.
In many languages a terminal consonant changes how the vowel before it sounds.
The terminal beat of the measure receives a slight emphasis from the conductor.
Similarfinal, closing, last, concluding
- 11A device through which signals carried by a line can be sent, received, or both.
The operator watched data arrive at the terminal from a remote station.
Every terminal on the line can both transmit and receive packets.
Note
Telecommunications looks at a line from its ends. Whatever sits at either end of a link counts, because it turns a user's input into signals for the line and the line's signals back into something usable. A telephone qualifies, and so does a network device. What makes something a terminal is its role in sending, receiving or both, not the shape of the machine.
- 12A storage tank for bulk liquids such as oil or chemicals, holding them before further distribution.
The company built a new terminal to store crude before it moves to the refinery.
The chemicals sit in the terminal for weeks until distribution schedules clear.
Similardepot
- 13The branching end of an axon, or one of the extremities of a polypeptide chain.
Neurotransmitters are released from the axon terminal into the synaptic gap.
Researchers labeled one terminal of the polypeptide to track how it folds.
Note
Biology uses the word for the ends of two quite different structures. In the nervous system, an axon terminal is the branching tip where synaptic contacts form. In biochemistry, a polypeptide chain has two terminals, the amino end and the carboxyl end, so the word usually comes with the end named.
- 14A symbol in a formal grammar that cannot be rewritten further, forming part of the final strings the grammar generates.
The grammar reduces each terminal directly to a token taken from the input.
A string of terminals remains once all the rules have been applied.
Oppositenonterminal
Note
Formal language theory divides a grammar's symbols into two kinds. Terminals come from the grammar's alphabet and actually appear in the strings it generates, and they never stand on the left side of a production rule. Nonterminals are the placeholders that rules rewrite. The word is short for terminal symbol, and the image is of an end point: once only terminals remain, the derivation is finished.
- 15A charge applied to all freight regardless of distance, meant to cover the cost of station service rather than the movement itself.
Because the terminal applied to every consignment alike, distance played no part in that portion of the bill.
The railway's terminal covered loading and unloading, while the mileage rate paid for the journey itself.
- 16A town lying at the end of a railroad line, where the end station is located, though it is more properly called a terminus.
The terminal at the end of the line swelled with traders waiting for the next train west.
Maps marked the terminal as the final town the railroad reached before the mountains.
Similarterminus
Note
Here the station's name has spread to the town around it, and careful writers resist the spread. They keep terminal for the station at the end of the line and use terminus for the settlement where the railroad stops. Both words go back to the Latin for a boundary that lies behind the end-of-the-line station.
- 17To hold oil, chemicals, or other liquids in large tanks at a depot as a stage between production and onward shipment.
Operators terminal the oil at the coast until tankers arrive to carry it abroad.
Refiners often terminal their chemicals close to major shipping routes.
Similarstore
Note
A trade verb from the petroleum and chemical business, made from the storage-tank noun. Its object is the liquid itself: operators terminal oil or chemicals until a pipeline, train or tanker moves them on. It doubles its l the way travel does. US spelling has terminaled and terminaling, and UK spelling has terminalled and terminalling.
- 18Occurring once in each term, recurring regularly as one term follows another.
The board met for its terminal review whenever a term drew to a close.
Students took the terminal assessment that came around at the end of every term.
Note
An archaic use built on term as a fixed period, such as an academic or judicial term, rather than on the idea of an end. In this sense, a student's terminal fees were the fees owed each term. A modern reader will take terminal to mean final or fatal, so in current writing the safe word for this meaning is termly.
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Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Late Latin "terminalis" (relating to a boundary or to the end), which comes from Latin "terminus" (a bound, boundary, limit, or end).