Definition of "billboard"

He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead God loves me too like the faded and weathered letters on last year's billboard God loves me too

1932, William Faulkner, chapter 5, in Light in August, [New York, N.Y.]: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas; republished London: Chatto & Windus, 1933, page 98

The land refuses to change. The more he drives the more the region resembles the country around Mt. Judge. The same scruff on the embankments, the same weathered billboards for the same products you wondered anybody would ever want to buy.

1960, John Updike, 'Rabbit, Run', page 31

All America was on the verge of spring and the countryside was coming to glory, what we could see of the countryside through the smoke and billboards.

1971, Don DeLillo, Americana‎, Penguin, published 2006, Part 1, Chapter 5, p. 111

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

1977, Susan Sontag, “Melancholy Objects”, in On Photography‎, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 71

When a show leaves New York, it carries posters wherewith to embellish each fence and bill board in the land [...]

1902, “The Casual Club”, in The Onlooker‎, Volume 1, Part 2, 28 May, 1902

Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name “Camille.”

1918, Willa Cather, My Ántonia‎, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Book 3, Chapter 3, p. 308

Until the recent rash of North London line maps appeared on station billboards in the London area of BR, the service undoubtedly suffered from meagre and ineffectual publicity.

1964 July, “News and Comment: The Broad Street-Richmond line”, in Modern Railways, page 17