fax
/fæks/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.63 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
3
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Ellipsis of fax machine (“the device for faxing; the medium of communication that it provides”).
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "The fillok hyr deformyt fax wald haue a fair face."
- "OK, now take it down the hall to the fax."
- "You can send it via email or fax. You can use an online fax service where you upload a PDF and then send it to a fax number."
- "The details of his [Matthew Perrry's] relationship with Julia Roberts are so 1990s, it is unreal: he wooed her by fax (yes, kids, this was a thing)."
- "Hands trembling with excitement and impatience, I faxxed my credit history to Jerry Raskin, the real estate agent listed, and received an appointment to view the place."
- "Plaintiff contented that in a game show in London, England, in January of 1988, Mr. Steinberg entered into an oral agreement with Atari representatives to become the exclusive distributor of Atari Games’ products; that the proposed agreement was dictated at this meeting; and that within two days Mr. Steinberg sent defendant a faxxed confirmation of this oral arrangement reached at the London trade show."
Etymology
From Middle English fax, from Old English feax (“hair, head of hair”), from Proto-West Germanic *fahs, from Proto-Germanic *fahsą (“hair, mane”), from Proto-Indo-European *poḱsom (“hair”, literally “that which is combed, shorn, or plucked”), from Proto-Indo-European *peḱ- (“to comb, shear, pluck”). Cognate with Dutch vas (“headhair”), German Fachs (“head-hair”), Norwegian faks (“mane”), Icelandic fax (“mane”), Sanskrit पक्ष्मन् (pákṣman, “eyelash, hair, filament”).