C.A.T.V.

[David H]

On the little metal covers in the street for cable phone/TV cables, they all say C.A.T.V. I expect the c is for cable and the TV is obvious, but what does the A stand for?

[Noneck]

and

[smorodina]

The acronym means Community Antenna Television, although it is generally refered to now as Cable TV.

[David H]

Thanks Smorodina, I've been wondering about that for years- how on earth did you find out?

[darth vader]

so there's no confusion - CATV (the computer networking cable) is different and actually means CATegory 5 cable (full name is CATV UTP which means cat5 untwisted pair)

[smorodina]

Used to be in the tv trade. These systems date back to the 60s when they where used for distributing the normal channels in areas of poor reception - long before today's multi channel systems. Did a little bit of checking to confirm, American Heritage Dictionary agrees, as does this page: http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-006/_0778.h
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[j2buttonsw]

I thought CATegory 5 computer cables were called CAT5 rather than CATV see http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/cat5_cables_.ht
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