billboard

bill +‎ board

billboard (plural billboards)

1. A very large outdoor sign, generally used for advertising.
   • 1932, William Faulkner, Light in August, New York: Modern Library, 1950, Chapter 5, p. 91,

     He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead God loves me too like the faded and weathered letters on last year’s billboard God loves me too

   • 1971, Don DeLillo, Americana, Penguin, 2006, Part 1, Chapter 5, p. 111,

     All America was on the verge of spring and the countryside was coming to glory, what we could see of the countryside through the smoke and billboards.

   • 1977, Susan Sontag, “Melancholy Objects” in On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 71,

     Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

2. (dated) A flat surface, such as a panel or fence, on which bills are posted; a bulletin board.
   • 1902, “The Casual Club,” The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2, 28 May, 1902,

     When a show leaves New York, it carries posters wherewith to embellish each fence and bill board in the land […]

   • 1918, Willia Cather, My Ántonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Book 3, Chapter 3, p. 308,

     Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name “Camille.”

3. (nautical) A piece of thick plank, armed with iron plates, and fixed on the bow or fore-channels of a vessel, for the bill or fluke of the anchor to rest on.[1]
4. (computer graphics) A sprite that always faces the screen, no matter which direction it is looked at from.

• broadbill