Wort des Tages
6 May 2026
tone dialing
nounElektrotechnik
A system of telephone dialing in which each digit is transmitted as a burst of a single audio frequency.
Warum dieses Wort
The advantage over pulse dialing is that the tones sit in the voice band, so they travel the whole connection rather than just to the local exchange; that is what makes phone menus and remote codes possible at all.
In use
Old handset on that line is pulse only, so the voicemail system never hears it; swap in something with tone dialing and the codes go through.
Written by our editors to show how the term is used, not a recorded quotation.