telephoning

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The action of placing a telephone call in order to reach someone.

   Hours of telephoning finally tracked down the missing shipment.

   The job involves a lot of telephoning between branches each day.

   Similarphoning, calling

   Note

   A noun for the activity rather than for a single call, usually treated as a mass of effort: the Railway Magazine of 1954 praises indicators that reduced the telephoning by signalbox staff. It sits naturally in lists of campaign work, as in "telegramming, telephoning and writing" in The New York Times (1984). It can also take a plural, telephonings, for separate rounds of calls, as in William Hairston's Passion and Politics (2001).

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of telephone.

   The clerk was telephoning each customer to confirm the new delivery date.

   We spent the morning telephoning suppliers about the delayed parts.

   Note

   The -ing form drops the silent final e of telephone and does two jobs: after be it builds the progressive (she was telephoning), and on its own it works as a gerund. Because the verb is ambitransitive, it can take a person as object (telephoning a customer), stand alone (he spent the evening telephoning), or take the message itself (telephoning the news). Once it takes a plural, it has become the noun for the activity.

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