In publishing, any periodical, or regularly-published publication, containing a mix of staff-written or freelanced articles and features, usually pertaining to one particular subject. Magazines may be slick and colorful, or they can be black-and-white and less elaborate. They also usually contain some quantity of photographic content. Most magazines also obtain the bulk of their revenue from the selling of advertising space. The point at which a newsletter becomes a magazine is blurry, but the latter tends to be less slickly and expensively produced, and relies less on advertising than subscription fees for revenue.
The word "magazine" itself dates from the Arabic word makhazin and the Italian word magazzino, both of which meant "storehouse." In English, the word "magazine" also had (and retains in many cases) this meaning. In seventeenth-century English, the word "magazine" was first used to refer to a publication that was a "storehouse of information."
The word magazine also refers to any container or device used to store objects or materials, as in an artillery magazine which holds ammunition. In hot-metal typesetting, the term also had this meaning, referring to a container in which the type matrices were sorted and stored. Typefaces could be changed by removing one magazine and inserting another.