Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A person versed in telephony, or who uses the telephone.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A telephone operator.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun someone who helps callers get the person they are calling

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Six fired, sir, 'called the telephonist, and as he spoke there came the shrieks of the shells, and the white puffs of the bursts low down and between the prone British line and the advancing Germans.

    Between the Lines Boyd Cable 1910

  • She arrived at 17, "extraordinary of my parents to let me", and after the Colonels took over Greece and her father's business "went belly-up", worked six days a week in the Mayfair Hotel as a room-service telephonist to pay for her O and A-levels: "It was rather fun," she says.

    Vicky Pryce: 'I thought we were a unit' 2011

  • It remains in dispute whether the Daily Mail first christened them All Blacks through their original all-black uniform or because of their novel "all-court" style of 15-man running play and the term "all backs" was transposed to "blacks" by a Fleet Street telephonist.

    How the original All Blacks went down in the annals of history Frank Keating 2010

  • She was working as a telephonist at a publisher's in Camden Town, earning her keep, and we kept on being interrupted by the phone going.

    Beryl Bainbridge earns a Booker at last 2011

  • Amazingly, the telephonist put me straight through, and at length Miss Kitt picked up the phone, and, after an exquisitely timed pause, she acknowledged me with a superb, gravelly “Hello?”

    Archive 2009-01-01 2009

  • In 1895 Ralph Morris, an American telephonist, invented the string of electric Christmas lights similar to the ones we use today.

    29 December -- St Thomas of Canterbury John 2008

  • She had already met them all that afternoon, but there were three missing, someone told her; Harry, the telephonist, who was on duty.

    You Don't Take Names Ajay Nair 2010

  • Ready from Day One to be a late night telephonist?

    Hillary Ad: Who Do You Want Answering The White House Phone At 3 a.m.? 2009

  • But this all to do with the age in which ST:TOS was produced: Nichelle was a telephonist, with a mini-skirt.

    Sexist split infinitive Jes 2009

  • In the following years she worked as a young nanny, telephonist, office worker, stenographer and journalist and had several short stories published.

    The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007 - Bio-bibliography 2007

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