monitor

monitor (ˈmɒnɪtə)
—n
1.	a person or piece of equipment that warns, checks, controls, or keeps a continuous record of something
2.	education
	a.  a senior pupil with various supervisory duties
	b.  a pupil assisting a teacher in classroom organization, etc
3.	a television screen used to display certain kinds of information in a television studio, airport, etc
4.	the unit in a desk computer that contains the screen
5.	a.  a loudspeaker used in a recording studio control room to determine quality or balance
	b.  a loudspeaker used on stage to enable musicians to hear themselves
6.	a device for controlling the direction of a water jet in fire fighting
7.	See also Komodo dragon any large predatory lizard of the genus Varanus and family Varanidae, inhabiting warm regions of Africa, Asia, and Australia
8.	mining Also called: giant a nozzle for directing a high-pressure jet of water at the material to be excavated
9.	(formerly) a small heavily armoured shallow-draught warship used for coastal assault
—vb
10.	to act as a monitor of
11.	to observe or record (the activity or performance) of (an engine or other device)
12.	to check (the technical quality of) (a radio or television broadcast)
[C16: from Latin, from monēre to advise]
monitorial
—adj
moni'torially
—adv
'monitorship
—n
'monitress
—fem n

monitor
EXPAND

mind (n.)). The lizard so called because it is supposed to give warning of crocodiles (1826). Meaning "squat, slow-moving type of ironclad warship" (1862) so called from name of the first vessel of this design, chosen by Capt. Ericsson because it was meant to "admonish" the Confederate leaders in the U.S. Civil War. Broadcasting sense of "a device to continuously check on the technical quality of a transmission" (1931) led to special sense of "a TV screen displaying the picture from a particular camera." The verb is attested from 1924. Related: Monitored; monitoring.

COLLAPSE

monitor mon·i·tor (mŏn'ĭ-tər)
n.
A usually electronic device used to record, regulate, or control a process or system. v. mon·i·tored, mon·i·tor·ing, mon·i·tors

monitor   (mŏn'ĭ-tər)  Pronunciation Key  A device that accepts video signals from a computer and displays information on a screen. Monitors generally employ cathode-ray tubes or flat-panel displays to project the image. See Note at pixel.

monitor definition

1. A cathode-ray tube and associated electronics connected to a computer's video output. A monitor may be either monochrome (black and white) or colour (RGB). Colour monitors may show either digital colour (each of the red, green and blue signals may be either on or off, giving eight possible colours: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow) or analog colour (red, green and blue signals are continuously variable allowing any combination to be displayed). Digital monitors are sometimes known as TTL because the voltages on the red, green and blue inputs are compatible with TTL logic chips.
See also gamut, multisync, visual display unit.
2. A programming language construct which encapsulates variables, access procedures and initialisation code within an abstract data type. The monitor's variable may only be accessed via its access procedures and only one process may be actively accessing the monitor at any one time. The access procedures are critical sections. A monitor may have a queue of processes which are waiting to access it.
3. A hardware device that measures electrical events such as pulses or voltage levels in a digital computer.
4. To oversee a program during execution. For example, the monitor function in the Unix C library enables profiling of a certain range of code addresses. A histogram is produced showing how often the program counter was found to be at each position and how often each profiled function was called.
Unix man page: monitor(3).
5. A control program within the operating system that manages the allocation of system resources to active programs.
6. A program that measures software performance.