telephone call
57
1.0
- noun
- /ˈtɛlɪˌfoʊn kɔl/
:
llamada
- After waiting for days, she finally received a telephone call from the company offering her a job.
- make a telephone call
- receive a telephone call
- a follow-up telephone call
And my friend, an OG called Spencer Benjamin, gets a telephone call from a guy called Ediata.
- And my friend, an OG called Spencer Benjamin, gets a telephone call from a guy called Ediata.
- And it's also like the reason texting is so preferable to telephone calls is because you do have to do the small talk chitchat when you call.
- And you know, an analogy to this is before the Internet, books and movies and music and songs, telephone calls, those are all different.
- It's not mostly telephone calls, but they also do have some telephone calls that were left on on telephone messages.
- I, I, I really want my telephone calls to get through and I want the quality of what I am talking coming up at the other end.
Examples
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In addition, over 397,000 telephone calls were made to NHS Direct in this period.
Academic text (2011) -
I just have to make a telephone call.
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And so a number of us got telephone calls and said, is this for real?
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I have a telephone call for you from Paris.
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Just before the book was to be published, I received a telephone call from my editor.
Academic text (1993) -
I have to make a telephone call to England, which is urgent.
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But then one night at ten o'clock, I received a telephone call from him.
Academic text (1992) -
And when Mother refused, she made a frantic telephone call to our father.
Fiction book (1998) -
Mr Hinkley, you have a telephone call on line one and there's a gentleman here to see you.
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By the end of the first week, viewers inundated KCRA with laudatory letters and telephone calls.
Academic text (2017)
Synonyms
∞
1.0
A time when someone phones another person
∞
1.0
A time when you talk to someone by telephone
14
1.7
A talk between two or more people using a phone
How Expressive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'an act of speaking by telephone' is directly and compositionally derived from 'telephone' (the medium/device for voice communication) + 'call' (a single instance of contact). This simple noun–noun compound follows common cross-linguistic patterns, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Telephone call joins the words telephone, a machine that sends your voice far away, and call, an old word for asking someone to come or to speak. When telephones arrived, people used the familiar idea of 'calling' to mean making voice contact, so a telephone call simply means speaking with someone by telephone.