WordNet
n. a long strip of inked material for making characters on paper with a typewriter [syn: ribbon]
Wikipedia
A typewriter ribbon or ink ribbon is an expendable module serving the function of transferring pigment to paper in various devices for impact printing. Such ribbons were part of standard designs for hand- or motor-driven typewriters, teleprinters, stenotype machines, computer-driven printers and many mechanical calculators, before electronic alternatives replaced most of them.
The module consists of a length of a medium, either pigment-impregnated woven ribbon or pigment-coated polymer tape, and a transport mechanism involving two axles. At any given moment, most of the length of the medium is wound as a close-spaced spiral around one axle or the other, tight enough for friction among turns to make it behave mostly like a solid cylinder. Rotation of the axles moves the ribbon or tape after each impact and usually aids in maintaining tension along the roughly straight-line path of the medium between the axles. The module may itself include mechanisms that control the tension in the temporarily unwound portion of the medium.
Usage examples of "typewriter ribbon".
But if you are sitting alone day after day at your typewriter, turning out one story after another and having no one to talk to, no one to be with, and yet pro forma having a wife and four daughters from whose house you have been expelled, banished to a little single-walled shack that is so cold in winter that, literally, the ink would freeze in my typewriter ribbon, well, you are going to write about iron slot-eyed faces and warm young women.
I wanted a gadget which could do anything inside the home-cleaning and cooking, of course, but also really hard jobs, like changing a baby's diaper, or replacing a typewriter ribbon.
He took a used-up IBM typewriter ribbon out of it and began unreeling the ribbon on the floor and squinting at it.
I went straight to the typewriter, unwound the typewriter ribbon from the neck and ears of my baby daughter, Tandy, sat down on my son Robin's plastic automobile, got up again, picked the pieces of plastic out of myself and the chair, dried Robin's tears, handed Tandy to her mother for a bath, rewound the ribbon, put some paper in the machine, and nothing happened.
I discovered a few lines of that statement upon a fresh typewriter ribbon in Jerome Coffern’.
I crashed it down with all my strength in the wake of the gin bottle, and the visitor sprawled on the floor with blood gushing from his scalp and the typewriter ribbon rolling across his unconscious face and away to the wall.
Finally, the President put down the pages, typed by himself, Burden noticed, recognizing the characteristic blue of Wilson's typewriter ribbon.
He had no gun to bother about, and for safety destroyed the typewriter ribbon he had used to type his reports, replacing it with one of his spares.
The weather here is so freezing that the ink in my typewriter ribbon occasionally .