Smartphone

How to spell smartphone

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce smartphone

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does smartphone mean?

1. nounA mobile phone that runs apps and connects to the internet, combining telephone and computer functions.

Smartphone in a sentence

• She checked the train times on her smartphone before leaving home.

• The company issued every employee a work smartphone with email installed.

Where does smartphone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern compound built from two English elements: 'smart', an old Germanic word that originally meant sharp or stinging (as in a smarting wound) before it came to mean clever or capable, and 'phone', a clipping of 'telephone'. The 'phone' part traces back to the Greek phone, meaning 'voice' or 'sound', the same root that sits inside words like 'microphone' and 'symphony'. The pairing emerged in the 1990s to describe mobile phones that added computing features such as email and web browsing, and it became an everyday term after touchscreen handsets arrived in the late 2000s. Because both halves are common English words, the only spelling question is whether it is written as one word, which it now standardly is, with no hyphen or space.

How the word is built

• smart (clever, capable)
• phone (from telephone; ultimately Greek phone, voice/sound)