Airwaves are the invisible pathways through the air that radio and television signals travel on to reach your home. When a radio station broadcasts music or a TV station sends out a show, those signals move through the airwaves as electromagnetic waves, similar to how ripples spread across a pond after you toss in a stone.

When someone says a song is “on the airwaves,” they mean it's being broadcast on radio stations. When a politician wants to get their message out, they might buy time “on the airwaves” to run television commercials.

Governments carefully regulate the airwaves because there's only so much space available. If everyone broadcast on the same frequencies at once, the signals would interfere with each other and create chaos. That's why radio stations have different numbers on the dial, like 101.5 FM, 680 AM, and so on. Each station gets its own slice of the airwaves.

People also use airwaves more loosely to mean any kind of broadcasting, even though modern streaming over the internet doesn't technically use airwaves. When someone says “I heard it on the airwaves,” they usually just mean they heard it on the radio.