Broad (pronounced brawd)
(1) Of
great breadth.
(2) A
quasi-standard expression of lineal measurement (from side to side).
(3) Of
great extent; large; extensive, ample, spacious, vast.
(4) Wide-open;
full (applied usually to daylight).
(5) Not
limited or narrow; of extensive range or scope (applied to knowledge,
experience etc).
(6) Liberal;
tolerant (semi-institutionalized as one of the three factions of the Anglican
Church (Low, broad & high).
(7) A
generalized summary of something (often as broad outline); general rather than
specific.
(8) Something
made plain or clear; outspoken.
(9) Indelicate;
indecent, vulgar (now rare).
(10) Of
conversation, rough; countrified, unrefined.
(11) Unconfined;
unbridled; unrestrained.
(12) In
linguistics, of pronunciation, strongly dialectal; the most exaggerated of its
type; consisting of a large number of speech sounds characteristic of a
particular geographical area or social class.
As applied to Gaelic languages: velarized (ie palatalized).
(13) In
phonetics, of a transcription, using one basic symbol to represent each
phoneme; of or relating to a type of pronunciation transcription in which
symbols correspond approximately to phonemes without taking account of
allophonic variations.
(14) In
(mostly historic US & Canadian) slang, a usually disparaging term for a
women, often one that hints at promiscuity (but not prostitution); often in the
plural.
(15) In
film & television production, an incandescent or fluorescent lamp used as a
general source of light in a studio.
(16) A
type of wide-bladed battle sword.
(17) A
gold coin of England and Scotland, minted first in 1656 and issued by James I
and Charles I; equal to 20 shillings.
(18) As
broadband, a term now vague in meaning which implies a high-speed internet connection
but which has been applied to any service rated faster than the highest speed
possible using a single analogue modem connected with a conventional phone line
(copper pair (Cat3)).
(19) In
public finance, as broad money, denoting an assessment of liquidity including
notes and coins in circulation, bank holdings, most private-sector bank
deposits, and certain bank-deposit certificates; usually classed as M3 in the
(sort of) standardized system by which OECD countries measure the money supply.
(20) In
UK dialectal use, a river spreading over a lowland (in East Anglia, a shallow
lake).
(21) In
woodworking, a wood-turning tool used for shaping the insides and bottoms of
cylinders.
(22) In
the UK, a common pronunciation of B-road (a secondary road).
Pre
1000: From the Middle English brood, brode,
brod & broad from the Old
English brād (broad, flat, open,
extended, spacious, wide, ample, copious; not narrow), from the Proto-Germanic braidi, from the Proto-West Germanic braid, from the Proto-Germanic braidaz (broad), of uncertain origin. It was cognate with the Scots braid (broad), the West Frisian breed (broad), the Saterland Frisian breed (broad), the Low German breet & breed (broad), the Dutch breed
(broad), the German & Old High German breit
(broad, wide), the Danish, Swedish & Norwegian Bokmål bred (broad), the Norwegian brei (broad), the Icelandic breiður
(broad, wide), the Old Norse breiðr (breithr),
the Old Frisian brēd and the Gothic braiths & brouþs. The word is not
found except in Germanic languages and there has never been any clear
distinction between broad & wide although there are conventions of use but
they vary widely (and presumably in some places broadly) by geographical
region. Related and
sometimes synonymous words include deep, expansive, full, large, vast,
comprehensive, extensive, far-reaching, sweeping, universal, wide, wide-ranging,
clear, explicit, straightforward, radical, improper, indecent & roomy. Broad is a noun & adjective, broadly is an adverb; broadness is a noun, broaden is a verb, broadening is a noun & verb and broadest & broadish are adjectives; the noun plural is broads.
Circa
1300, broad also had the specific meaning "breadth", now obsolete,
which was from broad the adjective. The
sense of "shallow, reedy lake formed by the expansion of a river over a
flat surface" was a Norfolk dialect word from the 1650s and broad had
assumed its (broad) meaning as "the broad (wide) part" of anything by
1741. The broad-brim hat was first
described in the 1680s and the phrase “broad-brimmed” or “broad-brimmer” was
eighteenth & nineteenth slang for a "Quaker male", so described
because of their characteristic attire.
Broad-minded (in the sense of open-minded, liberal, less judgmental) was
from the 1590s but this abstract mental sense of broad existed also in Old
English as bradnes which meant both "breadth"
& "liberality".
Some swordsmiths insist the only true
broadsword is one of the “basket-hilted swords”, characterized by a
basket-shaped guard at the hilt which protects the hand, an elaboration of the quillons
added to swords' cross-guards since the later Middle Ages. What everybody else now calls the broadsword
is a bladed weapon of the early modern era (sixteenth-seventeenth century), the
construct in Old English being brad +
swurd and, exclusively a battlefield
weapon, they were always distinguished from rapiers and other dueling swords by
their wide and often long & thick blades.
The term
broadsheet was first used to describe a newspaper in 1705 when the
distinguishing characteristic was being a “large sheet of paper printed on one
side only”; by 1831 the usual phrase was “"a broadsheet newspaper"
which in the twentieth century evolved into a distinction between the sober
publications of record, reflection and reporting (The Times of London, The New
York Times, The Manchester Guardian
etc) and the popular tabloid press concerned with entertainment, sport and
(increasingly) celebrity culture (the News
of the World, The Sun, the New York News etc), based on the former
being printed in larger formats, the latter half-sized (tabloid in printer’s
jargon. Even when some broadsheets
switched to the smaller format, the phraseology remained and seemed to have
survived even where some have abandoned print editions entirely, tabloid
journalism still something simultaneously popular and disreputable.
Broadway (like High Street or Main Road) became a common street name apparently as early as circa 1300, applied obviously to particularly wide roads or streets, the allusive use for "New York’s theater district" dating from 1881. The derivative “off broadway” (sometime with initial capitals) described smaller theatres in the New York City area, those with fewer than 300 seats, or a production in such a theater, usually away from the "Broadway" theater district and which operated under special rules from the theatrical unions which permitted productions to be mounted at much lower cost. Use of off-broadway was first noted in 1953 as the volume of productions began greatly to expand in the buoyant post war economy and off-off & off-off-off (etc) broadway followed, the number of “offs” hinting progressively at the diminishing size of the budget, theatre and reputations of those associated with the production.
Broadcasting
in the modern understanding of the word attained critical mass first in the
1920s as medium-wave AM radio became popular as the cost of vacuum tube radio
transmitters and receivers fell to affordable levels. Broadcasting was based on the idea in
agriculture of broad-sowing, the casting of seeds over a broad area and was electronic
communication on a one-to-many basis, as opposed to earlier radio, telephone,
and telegraph models which were one/few to one/few. Although the technology and the distribution
platforms have since much evolved, broadcasting remains conceptually the same
but the technological changes have greatly affected the behavior of audiences and
much of what “broadcasters” now do is really stranded narrowcasting, the
content designed not for the large-scale, even nation-wide catchments which
once were available but aimed instead at specific demographics also served by
the narrowcasters proper. So changed is
the environment that the terms are now less useful than when there were clear
distinctions between them.
The
apparently etymologically baffling use of broad to describe a woman with some
suggestion of promiscuity has attracted speculation. It’s been suggested it might be an alteration
of bride, especially through influence of the cognate German Braut, which was used in a similar sense
(young woman, hussy) and there was the Middle High German brūt (concubine) but, especially given it came to be noted as a
generalized slang term for women only circa 1911 in US use, etymologists prefer
to link the development to the earlier slang “abroadwife”, used to mean both “woman
who lives or travels without her husband" and “woman maintained in another
place by a man and unknown to his wife”.
It’s now a dated form, used sometimes ironically but has often been misapplied
with a suggestion of prostitution. Because
of these negative associations, and the increasing popularity of women's
athletics, the name of the track and field “broad jump” (dating from 1863) was
changed to “long jump”, beginning in the US in 1967 and soon adopted by
athletics federations worldwide.
Some broadband is more broad than others: Indicative speed (January 2022) of internet connections in selected countries based on Ookla’s speedtest.net data, the informal standard for consumer-level speed testing.
The noun broadband actually dates from the 1620s in various senses from dressmaking to engineering. It was used in electronics from 1956 with the meaning "a band having a wide range of frequencies" but the now most familiar use is as a descriptor of high-speed internet access. Although the term broadband had since the 1970s been used in the technical language of the then embryonic industry of networking and distributed communications, it was little known by the public until the first standards were published for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), a consumer-level version of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology. Ever since, it’s been used in the sense of “high-speed internet” but except for some local (and usually quickly outdated) legislated definitions, it’s never had a universal or even generally accepted meaning beyond the very early implementations when it was understood to imply a connection faster than the fastest service attainable by a single (8000/8000 baud; V.92; 56.0/48.0 kbit/s down/up) analogue modem connected with a conventional phone line (untwisted copper pair (UTP-Cat3)) which was usually accepted to be 56 kbit/s. That soon was not a great deal of help and now, unless in a jurisdiction where use of the term broadband requires the maintenance of minimum up & download speeds, it’s really just an advertising term and unless a service so advertised turns out to be so slow that the use might be held to be deceptive or misleading, is often little more than “mere puffery”. Hotels which in the 1990s and early 2000s spent a lot of money to install the hardware and software to support what was then “broadband” which they advertised as such soon, faced complaints as rapid advances in technology rendered their infrastructure quickly obsolescent and slow, the only solution sometimes to replace all the equipment although many instead took advantage of the profit-sharing industry which emerged, third-parties handling the installation and support, the hotel taking just a commission on total revenue. Just as a precaution, some gave up on advertising “broadband” and instead offered the even more vague “hi-speed” which definitely meant nothing in particular.
Broadcloth (also as broad-cloth) was a "fine woolen cloth used in making men's garments" and dates from the early fifteenth century, the name derived from its width (usually 60 inches (1.5m)). The phrase “broad daylight” emerged in the late fourteenth century and broad was first applied to speech and accents during the 1530s. To be “broad in the beam” is to be overweight, the term, predictably, applied almost exclusively to women. To have “broad shoulders” suggests an ability to take criticism, or accept responsibility, an allusion to the figure of Atlas from Greek mythology who was condemned to forever carry on his shoulders the weight of the world. In admiralty jargon, “broad on the beam” is a nautical bearing 90° to the heading of a vessel while “broad on the bow” is a bearing 45° to the heading of a vessel. Broadacre farming or agriculture is a generalized reference to activities undertaken on large-scale open areas as opposed to smaller, fenced enclosures and can be used to describe either cropping or animal production. The expression, like “mileage” or “tons” has survived metrification; “broadhectare” does exist as jargon in the field of residential land supply but is not widely used.
The
Anglicans
Some
time ago, the ever-entertaining Anglican Church, sort of formalized their three
warring factions as the low and lazy, the broad and hazy and the high and
crazy:
The Low
and Lazy
Like
the high churchers, the low lot still believe in God but, their time not absorbed
plotting and scheming or running campaigns to stamp out gay clergy and opposing
the ordination of women, they actually have time to pray, which they do,
often. The evangelical types come from
among the low and don’t approve of fancy rituals, Romish ways or anything
smelling of popery. Instead, they like
services where there’s clapping, dancing and what sounds like country &
western music with sermons telling them it’s Godly to buy things like big TVs
and surf-skis.
The Broad
and Hazy
The
broad church is more a club than a church, something like the Tory Party at
prayer. The parishioners will choose the
church they (occasionally) attend on the same basis as their golf club, driving
miles if need be to find a congregation acceptably free of racial and cultural
diversity. They’re interested not at all
in theology or anything too abstract so sermons are preached to please the
bourgeoisie. The broad church stands for
most things in general and nothing in particular, finding most disputes in
Anglicanism baffling; they just can't see what all the fuss is about.
The High
and Crazy
The
high church has clergy who love dressing up like The Spice Girls, burning incense and chanting the medieval liturgy
in Latin. They disapprove of about
everything that’s happened since the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer and believe there’d be less sin were there
still burnings at the stake. Most high
church clergy wish Pope Pius IX was still running the show from Rome and some
act as though he’s still there.
Of money
The
United States
The US Federal
Reserve provides only two main measures of money M1 (narrow) and M2 (broad). M1 consists of currency in circulation,
travelers’ checks of nonbank issuers, demand deposits, and other checkable
deposits (eg negotiable order of withdrawal accounts at depository institutions). M2 is M1 plus savings deposits and money
market deposit accounts, time deposit accounts below $100,000, and balances in
retail money market mutual funds. The
interesting thing about the US is that the Fed’s M1 & M2 excludes a lot of
what most economists regards a money in the US but it’s very difficult to
estimate how much, all agreeing only that it’s big number.
The
Euro Zone
The
European Central Bank (ECB) publishes M1, M2 & M3, each measure becoming
progressively broader. M1 includes currency
in circulation plus overnight deposits.
M2 is M1 plus deposits redeemable at notice of up to three months and
deposits with an agreed maturity of up to two years. M3 is M2 plus repurchase agreements, money
market fund shares, money market paper, and debt securities issued with a
maturity of fewer than two years.
The
United Kingdom
The
Bank of England uses four measures of money, M0, M2, M4, and M3H, M0 the
narrowest, M4 the broadest. M0 is currency
in circulation plus bankers’ deposits held by the Bank of England. M2 is M0 plus deposits held in retail banks. M4 is M2 plus certificates of deposits, and
wholesale bank and building society deposits.
The mysterious M3H is a parity device which exists to allow the Bank of
England to align their reporting for statistical purposes with the money supply
measures published by the ECB and this is M4 plus foreign currency deposits in
banks and building societies.
Australia
The
Reserve Bank of Australia used to use M1, M2 & M3 but now publishes M1, M3
& Broad Money. M1 is currency in circulation
plus bank current deposits from private non-bank entities. M3 is M1 plus other deposits from building
societies and credit unions with banks. Broad
Money is M3 plus borrowings from the private sector by non-bank depository
corporations excluding holdings of currency and deposits of non-bank depository
corporations.
Japan
The Bank
of Japan is a monetary classicist and publishes M1, M2, and M3, where M1 is the
narrowest and M3 the broadest. M1
includes currency in circulation plus deposits.
M2 is M1, plus certificates of deposit.
M3 is M2 plus savings and deposits at financial institutions and post
offices.
For
countries which run modern economies with convertible currencies and a high
degree of interoperability and (usually), little (at least by historic standards)
in the way of exchange controls, it may seem strange that the definitions of
money vary to the extent they do, the only feature of commonality really that
each maintains a measurable concept of narrow and broad money. Only a few central banks, such as the Bank of
England, include a device with which those interested in such things can align
the numbers more accurately to compare one with another; it’s almost as if the
central banks and governments like some vagueness in the system.
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