A synopsis of the present state of the art in trellis-coded modulation (TCM) is given. The general structure of TCM schemes and the principles of code construction are reviewed, and the effects of carrier-phase offset in carrier-modulated TCM systems are discussed. The latter is important, since TCM schemes turn out to be more sensitive to phase offset than uncoded modulation systems. Also, TCM schemes are generally not phase invariant to the same extent as their signal sets. Recent advances in TCM schemes that use signal sets defined in more than two dimensions are then described, and other work related to trellis-coded modulation is mentioned. The best codes currently known for one-, two-, four-, and eight-dimensional signal sets are given in an appendix.