Vidscreen

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A display surface on which moving video images or pictures are shown, such as a television or computer monitor
2. An electronic panel that shows recorded or live video footage to viewers
3. A flat visual display device used to present moving images from a camera, player or broadcast source

Etymology: "Vidscreen" is a compound of "vid," a clipped form of "video," and "screen." The first element is the more telling part: "video" comes from the Latin "videre," meaning "to see," and was first used in English as a plain adjective meaning relating to television images, a sense that dates from the 1930s. Clipping it down to "vid" was a colloquial shortening, and the word is a clear product of mid-twentieth-century electronics and its vocabulary. "Screen," by contrast, is an older English word, related to the sense of a physical partition or shield that blocks or shows something, and it came to name the glowing surface of a television or computer monitor. Putting the two together produces a plain descriptive coinage: a screen for showing video. The word therefore joins a new technology to an everyday shortened form, rather than drawing on an older tradition of invented terms.