offlineadj.adv.
/ˈɒflʌɪn/ (chiefly in sense B.)Brit. /ɒfˈlʌɪn/ (in both senses)U.S. /ˈɔfˈlaɪn/, /ˈɑfˈlaɪn/ A. adj.
1.
a. Situated or carried on away from a railway, or the main line of a railway; (also) not done by rail.
ΘΚΠ
society > travel > rail travel > railway system or organization > [adjective] > not situated or done on railway
offline1919
1919 Jrnl. Polit. Econ. 27 331 Another saving consisted in abolishing the off-line offices and setting the traffic department at other tasks.
1926 G. G. Huebner & E. R. Johnson Railroad Freight Service xvii. 338 Many railroads maintain ‘off-line’ offices or agencies at important industrial and commercial centers which they reach via connecting lines.
1973 E. Rath Container Syst. vii. 175 Bimodal containerization uses truck trailers or other highway vehicles or special containers... This service uses the rail network as the main artery and as prime source of railroad revenue. The off-line service is given as an accommodation to the freight market.
1973 Sci. Amer. Oct. 24/3 The achievement is made possible by off-line loading and automatic, positive control of all motions of the vehicle.
1986 Mod. Railways Feb. 29/3 Meanwhile, CR has opened off-line sales offices in Atlanta, Houston and San Francisco to help develop lumber, paper and food traffic.
b. Not served by or situated on the current authorized routes of an airline; (also) not directly involved with, or part of, a particular airline.
ΚΠ
1941 A. W. Currie in Canad. Jrnl. Econ. & Polit. Sci. 7 22 It is estimated that United Air Lines and Transcontinental-Western Airways have..off-line populations, that is, served by connections, of over fifteen millions.
1970 Daily Tel. 30 June 24 These two examples of off-line carriers in Britain..demonstrate the importance of interlining to the airlines.
1997 Business Line (Nexis) 3 May 2 Only the two Chicago-bound flights via Frankfurt remained in service... Amsterdam became offline during this period.
2. Computing.
a. Of an operation or process: carried out while not connected to or directly controlled by a computer. Of a device: not directly connected to a computer or receiving input from it.
ΘΚΠ
society > computing and information technology > [adjective] > status
offline1950
online1950
in-line1959
1950 W. W. Stifler High-speed Computing Devices (Engin. Res. Associates) ii. 7 For other applications, off-line operation, involving automatic transcription of data in a form suitable for later introduction to the machine, may be tolerated.
1957 D. D. McCracken Digital Computer Programming xii. 157 The reel of tape may then be removed from the auxiliary (‘off-line’) tape unit, placed on a tape unit which is connected to the computer (‘on-line’), and read in at high speeds.
1989 J. Gatenby GCSE Computer Stud. ii. 28 Data is punched by a key punch operator using a separate off-line machine (not connected to the computer).
1995 Desktop Publishers Jrnl. July 10/2 The Silver DigiPlater 1800 also exposes imagesetting film and paper, then transports them to a takeup cassette for offline processing.
b. Of a computer, program, user, etc.: not connected to or forming part of a computing network; (now esp.) not having access to the internet, not online.
ΚΠ
1969 Sunday Times 16 Feb. (Colour Suppl.) 22/3 The clearance and updating must be done when the computer is..‘off-line’, i.e. is uncoupled from any systems that the computer itself is controlling.
1977 Harvard Business Rev. 20 July–1 Aug. 1 Most of the early systems eschewed such complexity and installed off-line machinery. New lessons are being learned in today's online, off-premise banking environment.
1984 Computerworld (Nexis) 13 June 23 Communications and handshaking with the network will continue while the user executes a different off-line program in the foreground.
1995 .net June 78/1 Basically, an off-line newsreader would download each article and save them to your hard drive.
2000 Wall St. Jrnl. 18 Sept. a1/2 Net2Phone is switching strategies after concluding that long-distance calling is as cutthroat on the Internet as it is in the traditional off-line world.
3. Esp. in manufacturing: separate from or subsidiary to the main sequence of operations of a process; not performed on or forming part of a production line. Cf. in-line adj. 2.
ΚΠ
1963 Jrnl. Royal Statist. Soc. A. 126 507 With off-line tests on paper machines the time interval involved can be broken down as follows.
1972 Managem. Sci. 19 396 (heading) Off-line production... One of the alternatives open to the scheduler, when appropriate, is to find an alternate production facility to assume temporarily part of the demand on the machine in question.
2001 Plastics News (Nexis) 3 Dec. 3 Sonoco purchased the plant's three flexographic machines, three pouch-making machines and an offline, solventless laminator.
4. Chiefly Sport. Of a projectile, esp. a ball: not following a straight line, or the intended trajectory.
ΚΠ
1971 L. Koppett N.Y. Times Guide Spectator Sports i. 14 Many pitchers with good fastballs throw so that there is an off-line component to the ball's path—it tails off just a bit from true to left or right, or sinks.
1983 Golf Mag. (Nexis) Nov. 44 Aggressive play pays off only if one has the ability to recover from mishit or offline approach shots.
1992 Cornell Daily Sun (Ithaca, N.Y.) 15 Oct. 15/1 [A] desperation throw to the plate that was well offline.
5. Video Recording. Designating or relating to the initial stage of video editing, in which the desired parts are selected prior to being re-recorded in a master version. Also: carried out by mechanical handling of videotape, rather than electronically.
ΚΠ
1984 Back Stage (Nexis) 9 Nov. 58 The new facility will have executive offices,..three offline edit suites,..and extensive production equipment.
1993 Personal Computer World Aug. 454/2 Off-line editing produces a rough cut using two video recorders, one for the source material and one to show the edited tape.
2001 World Broadcast Engin. (Nexis) Nov. At first, these rudimentary computer editing systems remained offline tools. However, as the quality of compression and computer speed improved, the technology moved closer to the goal of full electronic editing.
B. adv.
As an offline process; while offline (in various senses); spec. (a) by offline equipment; (b) with a delay between the production of data and its processing; (c) when not connected to a computing network, esp. the internet.
ΘΚΠ
society > computing and information technology > [adverb] > connection status
offline1950
online1955
down1965
up1978
1950 W. W. Stifler High-speed Computing Devices (Engin. Res. Associates) ii. 7 Some teletype machines operate on line. Their operators are in instantaneous communication. Other teletype machines are operated off line, through the intervention of punched paper tape.
1964 T. W. McRae Impact Computers on Accounting i. 17 The tape is then..transferred to a smaller computer and printed off-line on the output printer of that computer.
1976 Operational Res. Q. (Nexis) 27 956 It was felt that..an alternative, and complementary, length should be produced to lessen wastage when the glass was later cut up off-line.
1977 Television Technol. (Brit. Kinematograph Sound & Television Soc. Educ. & Training Committee) viii. 23 Editing consoles..will control three quad machines to make a programme.., the addresses [of the required TV frames] having been found ‘off line’, ie: on cheap helical scans, film telerecordings or video disc machines.
1983 PC Week (Nexis) 29 Nov. 54 Under Pcox, users have to go offline, breaking off the connection to the mainframe and resuming independent PC operations to dump files to a printer.
1989 PC Resource Sept. 10/3 The software..includes a word processor for general use and for composing messages off line to save connect charges.
1991 Engineering July 9/2 The machine has been developed for Coborn to profile diamond grinding wheels off-line. Currently the job is done in situ on the production machine.
1999 Wall St. Jrnl. 31 Dec. b.2/4 Numerous enterprises with mainframe computers planned to take the systems off-line through the weekend, lest they be felled by a date glitch involving the switchover from 1999 to 2000.
2001 Estates Gaz. 30 June 145/2 An archiving system that enables huge amounts of electronic information to be archived offline—but be available online within seconds.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2004; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
<
adj.adv.1919