ONLINE Definition & Meaning

If a person is active over a messaging tool and is able to accept the messages it is termed as online message and if the person is not available and the message is left to view when the person is back, it is termed as offline message. In the offline state, or “offline mode”, users can perform offline browsing, where pages can be browsed using local copies of those pages that have previously been downloaded while in the online state. The online or offline state of the MUA does not necessarily reflect the connection status between the computer on which it is running and the Internet i.e. the computer itself may be online—connected to the Internet via a cable modem or other means—while Outlook is kept offline by the user, so that it makes no attempt to send or to receive messages. When online it will attempt to connect to mail servers (to check for new mail at regular intervals, for example), and when offline it will not attempt to make any such connection.

  • One includes Saint Peter asking for a username and a password before admitting a man into Heaven.
  • “Online” has come to describe activities and concepts that take place on the Internet, such as online identity, online predator and online shop.
  • Online and offline distinctions have been generalised from computing and telecommunication into the field of human interpersonal relationships.
  • We strive for accuracy and simplicity with every definition we publish.

Slater asserts that there are legal and regulatory pressures to reduce the distinction between online and offline, with a “general tendency to assimilate online to offline and erase the distinction,” stressing, however, that this does not mean that online relationships are being reduced to pre-existing offline relationships. This distinction between online and offline is sometimes inverted, with online concepts being used to define and to explain offline activities, rather than (as per the conventions of the desktop metaphor with its desktops, trash cans, folders, and so forth) the other way around. To support his argument that the distinctions in relationships are more complex than a simple dichotomy of online versus offline, he observes that some people draw no distinction between an online relationship, such as indulging in cybersex, and an offline relationship, such as being pen pals. The distinction between online and offline is conventionally seen as the distinction between computer-mediated communication and face-to-face communication (e.g., face time), respectively. Online and offline distinctions have been generalised from computing and telecommunication into the field of human interpersonal relationships. In the same context, the person’s availability is termed as online and non-availability is termed as offline.

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Over 500,000 expert-authored dictionary and thesaurus entries Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. sweepstakes 2023 Videos of the explosions ran continuously on television and online, and the efforts of the skeleton crew at the plant captured imaginations around the world. Dozens of dogs kept in sham animal shelters and used for online scamming have been rescued by police and animal rights organisations in Uganda following a BBC investigation. So I went online, and I started researching Frenchie. China’s market watchdog on Tuesday approved its acquisition of the online audio platform on condition that it fulfills a series of restrictive commitments to ensure fair market competition.

online Intermediate English

If you have feedback about this definition or would like to suggest a new technical term, please contact us. If you cannot access a specific website but others load correctly, the server that hosts the website may be offline. For two systems to communicate over the internet, both must be online. To add online to a word list please sign up or log in. French-English dictionary, translator, and learning

For communities that lack adequate Internet connectivity—such as developing countries, rural areas, and prisons—offline information stores such as WiderNet’s eGranary Digital Library (a collection of approximately thirty million educational resources from more than two thousand web sites and hundreds of CD-ROMs) provide offline access to information. Internet Explorer will download local copies of both the marked page and, optionally, all of the pages that it links to. This can be useful when the computer is offline and connection to the Internet is impossible or undesirable. A third example of a common use of these concepts is a web browser that can be instructed to be in either online or offline states. A device that is offline uses no external clock reference and relies upon its own internal clock. A tape recorder, digital audio editor, or other device that is online is one whose clock is under the control of the clock of a synchronization master device.