a measurement of the size of an audience for a radio or TV programme
Nielsen rating in American English
noun
an estimate of the total number of viewers for a particular television program, expressed as a percentage of the total number of viewers whose television sets are on at the time and basedon a monitoring of the sets of a preselected sample of viewers
Word origin
[1960–65; after the A.C. Nielsen Co., its originator]This word is first recorded in the period 1960–65. Other words that entered Englishat around the same time include: bicycle kick, go-go, pop art, power play, tag question