English▸ noun
1 a periodical publication containing articles and illustrations, typically covering a particular subject or area of interest:
a women's magazine
a car magazine.
▪ a regular television or radio program comprising a variety of topical news or entertainment items:
a religious magazine program aimed at the ordinary man and woman in the street.
2 a chamber for holding a supply of cartridges to be fed automatically to the breech of a gun:
he took the machine gun and a spare magazine.
▪ a receptacle for storing and feeding film to a camera, CDs to a compact disc player, etc.:
you can program only the playback sequence of the discs in the magazine, not individual tracks.
– ORIGIN late 16th century : from French magasin, from Italian magazzino, from Arabic maḵzin, maḵzan ‘storehouse’, from ḵazana ‘store up’. The term originally meant ‘store’ and was often used from the mid 17th century in the title of books providing information useful to particular groups of people, whence magazine (SENSE 1) (mid 18th century). magazine (SENSE 3), a contemporary specialization of the original meaning, gave rise to magazine (SENSE 2) in the mid 18th century.