![]() This was the agency within the government tasked with operating the communications network for the armed forces, and they made heavy use of the telegraph system.īoth the armed forces and those early meteorologists found great use in the telegraph since it allowed for the quick transmission of weather information across the country. Weather Bureau-the forerunner to the modern National Weather Service was initially part of the U.S. WX as an abbreviation was likely used very early on in telegraphy. Some say it’s because “WX” in Morse code has a nice sound to it (dit-dah-dah, dah-dit-dit-dah) while others speculate that it had something to do with X being also used for “exchange:” WX being “weather exchange.” It could also be just for continuity’s sake-several longer words are abbreviated by their first letter followed by an x, such as TX for transmit, RX for receive, and PX for press. The origins of “WX” aren’t exactly clear, but there are a few possibilities. As a result, morse code operators began to develop a set of internationally standardized abbreviations, just like the “BRB,” “LOL,” and “JK” of today’s text communication. While this revolutionized communication, it was still relatively slow since an entire sentence with dozens of characters could take minutes to send. He also created a code to represent the characters, a pattern of short and long sounds which are often referred to as “dits” and “dahs.” This changed in 1836 after inventor Samuel Morse demonstrated the use of electricity to send electrical pulses over wires, called the telegraph. Delays were common at any point on this trip. A letter that takes just a few days today to arrive at its destination took several weeks then, as mail needed to be loaded aboard trains to make long distance trips, and it was delivered to and from those trains by horse-drawn carriage. The fastest way to do so was via postal mail, and it wasn’t fast at all. Up until the mid-1800s, there was no instantaneous way to communicate. This may seem odd as there’s no “x” in the word “weather,” so where did it come from and why was it used? The answer lies in how we communicated in the days before telephones. Other English adjective-noun pairs are related in this way, too: e.g., hale as in “hale and hearty” and health (but hale, except in that expression, is now mostly replaced by “healthy”).Weather seems like an awfully short word to need an abbreviation, but it has one: WX. Obsolete forms include heighth and highth, and it is still common to hear people pronounce it that way.) wi de They follow a common English pattern that involves a vowel change (often to a shorter vowel) and the addition of th. ![]() ![]() Length, width, height, and depth are nouns are derived from the adjectives long, wide, high, and deep. And, as in two dimensions, terms like “length,” “width,” and “height” won’t feel natural or be clear for some shapes, like a tennis ball. When height would be unclear-for example if the figure is not “level” -people cannot know what is meant by width, depth, or height without labels, although length is generally still assumed to refer to the longest measurement on the figure.
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