podcast
n.n. a digital audio show, like a radio program, that you can download or stream from the internet. Most podcasts release new episodes regularly, and you can listen whenever you like.
n. an episodic series of digital audio files, made available for streaming or downloading, often focusing on a particular topic or theme
I listen to a podcast on my way to work.
She started a weekly podcast to share her travel stories with a wider audience.
The investigative podcast combines interviews and archival audio to create a deeply immersive and often unsettling narrative about unsolved historical mysteries.
2004, and the columnist Ben Hammersley was filing copy for The Guardian on what to call the business of distributing audio programmes via the internet. Space was tight; a compound was required. He proposed two. One was audioblogging, duller than a queue at the Post Office. The other stitched together Apple’s portable player and the veteran verb broadcast to make podcasting. The first survived the week; the second survives still.
The raw material had older credentials. Broad was already Old English brād, wide from the first millennium, while cast had crossed from Norse kasta and was hurling things about England by 1200. Apple’s iPod itself took its initial vowel from the Internet prefix i- and its second syllable from pod, a clipped echo of compartment or, if one prefers nautical metaphor, a detachable capsule for one’s entire record collection. The brand name preceded the format by three years.
Thus a compound begat a blend which begat a noun. Once the word was loose it shook off its hardware: you can now podcast from any handset, the Apple device strictly optional. The etymology, though, keeps its receipt from 2004 and the by-line of Mr Hammersley, who had merely needed a headline and accidentally christened a medium.