phones

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of phone.

   She charges all three phones overnight on the same power strip.

   Older phones often lacked cameras and color screens.

   Note

   A regular plural that serves two very different nouns. In everyday speech, phones are handsets: landlines and the small pocket devices that also run software. In phonetics, phones are individual speech sounds, counted as physical events without asking where they fit in a language's sound system. The same spelling is also the verb for calling someone, so "she phones" and "old phones" are told apart only by the words around them.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of phone.

   Whenever a problem comes up, she phones the help desk right away.

   The nurse phones each patient a day before the appointment.

   Note

   The -s form that goes with he, she, it or any singular noun subject. Every other present-tense subject takes bare phone. The verb works with or without an object. You can say she phones the help desk, or simply she phones every Sunday, leaving the person called understood.

3. 3
   nouncolloquialplural

   Headphones, small speakers worn over or in the ears for listening to sound privately.

   Slip your phones on if you want to hear the rough mix.

   The sound engineer monitored the take through a worn pair of phones.

   Similarheadphones, earphones, cans

   Note

   A clipped word from the recording studio: singers and engineers pull on phones to hear a mix or a vocal take. It exists only in the plural and takes plural agreement (these are comfortable, never this is), so a single set is a pair of phones. Because it looks exactly like the ordinary plural, context does the work: phones ripped off your head are headphones, and phones charging on a power strip are not.

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