appliance [M16th] Until the manufacturer Zanussi introduced its slogan ‘The appliance of science’ in the 1970s the use of appliance to mean ‘the application of something’ had become rare if not obsolete. This sense was an early one but had fallen out of use, and appliance generally meant ‘a device designed to perform a specific task’. Appliance entered the language much later than apply [LME], which is formed from Latin elements ad- ‘to’ and plicare ‘to fold’.