fax

noun, verb — 5 senses

fax

noun

/fæks/

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”).

1

UK, Dialectal, Obsolete, Usually The hair of the head.

2

Usually The face.

Obsolete and derisively

  • The fillok hyr deformyt fax wald haue a fair face.1710, Gawin Douglas, Virgil's Aeneis, translated into Scottish verse, page 253:
Derived terms
faxed, Fairfax, Halifax

fax

verb

Etymology Clipping of facsimile, first attested 1979.

1

To send a document via a fax machine.

  • 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.1990, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, volume 14, page 82:
  • 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.1991, Jury Verdicts Weekly, volume 35, page 10:
4 more examples
  • SENATOR BAUCUS, IT IS THE THIRD STATEMENT, YOUR CHALLENGE, THAT HAS LED TO THE MOST FRUSTRATION FOR THE PEOPLE I AM REPRESENTING TODAY. WE TOOK YOU AT YOUR WORD AND HAVE RALLIED AND CONVOYED TO MAKE YOU AWARE OF US, TELEPHONED, WRITTEN LETTERS, FAXXED YOU, AND SPOKE WITH YOU PERSONALLY TO LET YOU KNOW HOW WE FEEL.1992, Montana National Forest Management Act of 1991: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Public Lands, National Parks and Forests of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, One Hundred Second Congress, First Session on S. 1696; October 22, 1991, Washington: United States Government Publishing Office, →ISBN, pages 140–141:
  • A few of the corporations involved have frankly acknowledged the roadblock: their own fear of the POW/MIA movement. Some companies scheduled for a trade mission to Vietnam dropped out after receiving a faxxed message from the National P.O.W. Strike Force summed up by its leader: “We will go out of our way to destroy your company because you want to do business with filthy Communists who are holding American prisoners.”1993, H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A., or, Mythmaking in America, revised and expanded paperback edition, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, page 194:
  • Thanks to Franz Amador and Tony Barrett for helpful discussions. We gratefully acknowledge Oren Etzioni’s emergency faxxing service. This research was funded in part by National Science Foundation Grant IRI-8957302, Office of Naval Research Grant 90-J-1904, and a grant from the Xerox corporation.1993, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, →ISBN, page 737, column 1:
  • His logistic: to dress in the skin of the worker, / the technician, the programmer, / infiltrating himself in their milieu, / their offices, their plants, & their boards, / a bug in their systems, / crossing up the controls and the panels, / the wiring, the wave lengths, / the faxxing of messages, the spy-satellites / & their receptors, / changing their conceptions, their charts.1994, Olga Elena Mattei, “Part One: Poetry [§] The Angel of the Millennium (Accident at the Nuclear Plant)”, in Roberta Fernández, editor, In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, Houston, Texas: Arte Público Press, →ISBN, page 139:
Derived terms
faxable, refax

fax

noun

Etymology Clipping of facsimile, first attested 1979.

1

Abbreviation, Ellipsis Ellipsis of fax machine (“the device for faxing; the medium of communication that it provides”).

  • 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.
1 more example
  • 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).2023 October 29, Zoe Williams, “‘An ironic, self-deprecating metrosexual’: how Matthew Perry captured the spirit of the age”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
2

A document sent, or received and printed, by a fax machine.

Derived terms
black fax, cryptofax, e-fax, faxback, fax bomb, fax democracy, faxlore, fax modem, fax number

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.

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