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postal card

postal card

1.8
A card you send through the mail without an envelope
  • noun
  • /ˈpoʊstl kɑrd/
translation icon : postal
  • She spent the afternoon writing a postal card to her grandmother.

Examples

  • Send you a postal card from Canada.

  • Not a letter, not even a postal card since he left.

    Fiction book (1993)
  • Those postal cards had a curious history.

    Blog text (12)
  • I promise you. you will have a nice postal card from my niece.

  • "Justice is like the amount of sugar or salt on your table, regulated by the money you have." Paul had tacked the piece of white ribbon among his postal cards on the board in his room.

    Fiction book (1993)
  • I'm having it called "the love-mad stenographer," And we're sending out 100,000 postal cards To all the office girls in New York.

  • I received a beautiful postal card from my friend who traveled to Italy.

  • He collects vintage postal cards from various countries around the world.

Synonyms

postcard
vspostal card
184 1.0

A card with a picture that you send by mail with a short message

is issued by a postal authority rather than defined by picture or message length
mailing-card
vspostal card
2.7

A card sent by mail without an envelope that has a message

is issued by a postal authority rather than designed privately
lettercard
vspostal card
  • Archaic
8.0

A folded card that you write inside and seal before mailing

is a flat sheet issued for sending messages without folding or sealing

Surface Forms

postal card singular
postal cards plural

Morphology

postal + card

The meaning is directly and compositionally derived from 'postal' (pertaining to mail) + 'card' (a small flat item for messages), so a learner who knows both words can infer it is a card issued by the postal service for sending messages. This noun–noun composition is cross-linguistically common and follows standard English compounding, making the expression immediately comprehensible to a B1 learner.

Etymology

Postal card comes from the simple idea of a card made by the postal service for sending short messages. Because the post office printed and stamped these cards so they could be sent 'without an envelope', the phrase now means a message card you can post directly.