Phonebook

//ˈfoʊnˌbʊk// noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A directory of all the phone numbers used in a district.

    "One even proposes, in a workaday monotone, that the first hundred people in any Idaho phonebook could do just as well as the legislators at making decisions in the capital."

  2. 2
    a directory containing an alphabetical list of telephone subscribers and their telephone numbers wordnet
  3. 3
    A large lookup table. broadly

    "He does this by using the Domain Name System, or DNS, which is the phonebook for the Internet."

Verb
  1. 1
    To determine the identity of (an Internet user) by comparing personal information to real-world directories or databases (e.g., lists of people in phonebooks or relatives of those who have recently died). transitive

Synonyms

All synonyms
phone booktelephone booktelephone directory

Example

More examples

"One even proposes, in a workaday monotone, that the first hundred people in any Idaho phonebook could do just as well as the legislators at making decisions in the capital."

Etymology

From phone + book.

Related phrases

have more chins than a Chinese phonebooklookup tablephone number

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.