fax: [20] Fax is a sleeper of a word. The technology of facsimile telegraphy, by which a document is scanned and its image transmitted via a telegraphic link, had been around since the 1870s, but the word fax was not invented for it (in the USA, by the simple expedient of removing the end of facsimile) until the 1940s. Even then, faxes were not widely known about outside the world of commerce, and it was only in the 1970s that the technology, and with it the word (by now a verb as well as a noun), became an everyday phenomenon. Facsimile [17], incidentally, is simply a lexicalization of Latin fac simile ‘make similar’.
1948, in reference to the technology, short for facsimile(telegraphy). Meaning "a facsimile transmission" is by 1980. The verb attested by 1970. Related: Faxed; faxing.
Futurists predict that a "fax" terminal in the house or business office may someday complement or even replace the mail-carrier. ["Scientific American," 1972]
