Phones

How to spell phones

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce phones

What does phones mean?

1. nounMore than one telephone, especially mobile handsets.
2. verbTo contact someone by telephone, in the third-person present tense.

Phones in a sentence

• noun

  The latest phones go on sale at midnight.

• verb

  She always phones her mother on Sunday evenings.

• noun

  Both phones ran out of battery during the trip.

• verb

  He phones the office whenever he is running late.

Where does phones come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is the plural and present-tense form of 'phone', which is itself a clipping of 'telephone'. 'Telephone' was assembled in the nineteenth century from two Greek elements: 'tele', meaning 'far off' or 'at a distance', and 'phone', meaning 'voice' or 'sound'. The literal idea was a device for carrying the voice across a distance, and the word came into wide English use in the 1870s and 1880s alongside the new invention. By the 1880s speakers were already shortening it to the casual 'phone', and the plural simply adds the regular '-s'. That same Greek root 'phone' (voice or sound) lives on in many relatives such as 'microphone', 'symphony', and the linguist's term 'phoneme', which is a useful reminder that the silent-looking 'ph' here is really an 'f' sound spelled the Greek way.

How the word is built

• phone (from Greek phone: voice, sound)
• -s (plural noun / third-person verb suffix)