Cellphone

How to spell cellphone

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cellphone

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cellphone mean?

1. nounA portable telephone that connects through a cellular network rather than a fixed line.

Cellphone in a sentence

• She left her cellphone charging on the kitchen counter overnight.

• The meeting room has poor reception, so every cellphone kept dropping calls.

Where does cellphone come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is a compact blend of two older parts. The first element comes from 'cellular', which traces to the Latin cellula meaning 'a small room' or 'little chamber' (the same root that gives biology its 'cell'); engineers borrowed it because a mobile network divides its coverage area into many small zones, or cells, each served by its own transmitter. The second element is a clipping of 'telephone', built from the Greek tele 'far off' and phone 'voice or sound', so a telephone literally carries the voice over a distance. As portable cellular networks spread in the 1980s, North American speakers shortened 'cellular phone' to 'cellphone', written as one word, while British speakers more often settled on 'mobile'. The doubled l survives straight from 'cell', which is the small spelling detail worth remembering.

How the word is built

• cell (from cellular, a network of small zones)
• phone (from telephone, ultimately Greek phone: voice/sound)