crank call
4
6.7
- noun
- /kræŋk kɔl/
- Offensive
:
llamada de broma
- And there was this pause, and I sensed he thought it was a crank call and he was gonna hang up.
- make a crank call
Examples
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How do I know this isn't a crank call?
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I got a couple of crank calls myself.
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Well, I guess it must be a crank call.
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Sir, the police just had a crank call.
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This is not a crank call.
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Warn 'em they might get some crank calls.
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This cuts down on crank calls because they know calls will be checked out.
Academic text (1996) -
- We've had more than our share of crank calls lately.
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I had what I thought was a crank call saying the person responsible for McCormick's death was this lad Billy Devaney.
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I received a crank call that made me laugh because it was so silly.
How Malicious
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase can be partially decoded from its parts: a 'crank' (an eccentric or irritating person) plus a 'call' suggests a call made by an annoying person. However, the specific pragmatic sense 'prank/harassing telephone call' is a more specialized use that a B1 learner may not fully predict from the constituents alone, so it is only partly transparent.
Etymology
Crank call likely comes from crank, a word for an odd or annoying person, plus call for a telephone call. One popular story says an irritating person would phone to tease or harass someone, so today the phrase means 'a malicious or prank call'.