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Wireless communication

When the original entry for wireless was published in the OED in 1926 it occupied five short paragraphs. The revised entry has over eighty. There are several reasons for this large increase. One is that the present revision of the dictionary is likely to find more space for important compounds (such as wireless mast, wireless network, and wireless operator) than did the first edition. Another is that by 1926 the OED editors were doubtless aware of the need to bring their work (eventually spanning the years 1884 until 1928) to a close, and so they sometimes conflated material which might otherwise have been treated more expansively. But the key factor lies in the history of the word itself.

In 1926 (according to the material then available to the editors) there was no such thing as ‘a wireless’ (= a radio receiving set). Wireless was a term that had been known for some thirty years, and especially through wireless telegraphy and wireless telephony. These were the years in which international news entered the public consciousness through newspaper reports based on cables and wireless telegrams; or, on a local scale, a young man would send his young lady a wireless telegram from the railway station to tell her to expect him later that evening. The wireless telegram was the mobile phone of its day. And yet the technology was allowed only three inches of type in the first edition of the OED.

‘Wireless’ technology remained important throughout the first half of the twentieth century. But from a linguist’s perspective it confronted some opposition from the slick appeal of ‘radio’ words. ‘Radio’ compounds date from the very end of the nineteenth century, and by the 1920s they were threatening the predominance of ‘wireless’. ‘Radio’ and ‘wireless’ jostled for position: the radio receiving set was called either ‘a wireless’ or ‘a radio’ in the 1920s. Fifty years later, ‘wireless’ was running out of steam, and ‘radio’ was dominant.

We counted down the demise of wireless, but we were mistaken. The term has been rescued by the mobile phone and the laptop computer, as the revised definitions show. Furthermore, the new wireless entry documents the many compounds attesting to its current vitality in the language: wireless access point, wireless LAN, wireless network, wireless technology, etc. The ups and downs of wireless are illustrated in detail in the new revised entry.