English▸ noun
1 a periodical publication containing articles and illustrations, often on a particular subject or aimed at a particular readership:
a women's weekly magazine
a car magazine.
▪ (also magazine programme) a regular television or radio programme comprising a variety of topical items:
a religious magazine programme aimed at the ordinary man and woman in the street.
2 a container or detachable receptacle 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 Middle English: 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, from which came magazine (sense 1 of the noun) (mid 18th century). magazine (sense 3 of the noun), a contemporary specialization of the original meaning, gave rise to magazine (sense 2 of the noun) in the mid 18th century.