Lost Words: Remember When We Used Fax Machines?

Have you ever tried explaining a fax machine to a teenager? (I did yesterday!) It’s like describing a world without smartphones: ‘We used to scan documents and send them through phone lines. No, not as an email attachment…‘

Once upon a time, we used telephone books to find numbers, watched films on video cassette recorders (VCRs) and recorded messages on answering machines (because voicemail wasn’t a thing).

Families proudly displayed their encyclopaedias on their shelves—giant books that Google replaced overnight. We typed on clunky typewriters, rewound cassette tapes with pencils and walked around with a Walkman (a prehistoric version of Spotify, but chunkier) clipped to our jeans, feeling invincible.

Now? These words are disappearing faster than the last bag of popcorn at a Friday night film marathon.

As technology sprints ahead, our vocabulary shifts too.

What’s next? Will “email” sound ancient in 20 years?

Let’s take a moment to appreciate these forgotten gems. Tell me about your favourite “extinct” word—bonus points if you memorised phone numbers before mobile phones saved them.