tele-

tele-

derived from the Greek word tēle meaning ‘at a distance’, is one of the great formative elements of modern English and a genuine mirror of technological advance over several centuries. It occurred earliest in words such as telescope (first recorded in 1648), telegraph (1794), telegram (1852), telephone (1876 in its modern sense), telepathy (1882), and television (1907, a hybrid formed on the Latin element vision). In more recent formations tele- has been even freer of etymological constraints: telecommunication was formed first in French in 1937 at a conference in Madrid, telecast was modelled on broadcast, telegenic (meaning ‘visually attractive on television’) on photogenic, and teleport (a telecommunications centre involving the use of satellites, originally a back-formation from teleportation) on transportation; telesales (the selling of goods and services over the telephone) is chiefly BrE and dates from the 1960s, and words such as teleprinter, teleprompter, and teletext were formed simply by lumping tele- with an existing word of whatever origin.