Phone

How to spell phone

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce phone

What does phone mean?

1. nounA device used to make and receive calls and, in modern usage, to send messages and access the internet.
2. verbTo contact someone by telephone.

Phone in a sentence

• noun

  She left her phone charging on the kitchen counter overnight.

• verb

  Remember to phone the dentist before the surgery closes.

• noun

  The office phone rang twice before the call went to voicemail.

• verb

  I will phone you as soon as the train reaches the station.

Where does phone come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Phone is a shortening of 'telephone', a word coined in the 1830s from two Greek roots: tēle, meaning 'far off' or 'distant', and phōnē, meaning 'sound' or 'voice'. The combined idea was literally 'far sound', a device that carried a voice across a distance. As the telephone became an everyday object in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, English speakers casually clipped the long word down to just 'phone', keeping the back half rather than the front. The same phōnē root sits behind a whole family of sound words such as 'phonetics', 'symphony', and 'megaphone', which is exactly why the spelling keeps the Greek 'ph' for an /f/ sound rather than a plain 'f'. That silent-looking 'ph' is the only real spelling trap in an otherwise short, familiar word.

How the word is built

• phone (from Greek phōnē: sound, voice), a clipped form of 'telephone'