How to Use dial tone in a Sentence

dial tone

noun
  • But, after the sound of a dial tone, the pair went silent, and Negandhi’s studio crew again took over.
    — Ramon Antonio Vargas | Staff Writer, NOLA.com, 19 Sep. 2020
  • The din of city traffic is about 85 decibels; the hum of a dial tone, 80 decibels.
    — Jonas Shaffer, baltimoresun.com, 9 Sep. 2020
  • That allows the phone to start drawing power, giving the user a dial tone—the signal that the phone is ready to be used.
    — Kevin Dupzyk, Popular Mechanics, 27 Nov. 2015
  • The lead guitar sounds less like a guitar than a bizarro dial tone — a round, rich, buzzing that Sohn spins into puckish, prickly riffs.
    — Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone, 21 Sep. 2022
  • Sometime that morning Johan had entered the office and, attempting to make a call, found no dial tone.
    — Ew Staff, EW.com, 27 Apr. 2021
  • Barrymore, however, wasn’t surprised by the dial tone.
    — Emlyn Travis, Entertainment Weekly, 14 Oct. 2025
  • For five months, the spacecraft transmitted unusable data equivalent to a dial tone.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 6 May 2024
  • In some cases, the sound of a dial tone may constitute service under the tariff test and therefore not even trigger a public comment and review.
    — Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica, 14 Nov. 2017
  • Streep blissing out to a dial tone, flirting awkwardly with Chris Cooper, brushing her teeth while stoned, smiling at her toes.
    — Chris Hewitt, Star Tribune, 8 Dec. 2020
  • OpenAI’s Sora has made that problem seem as antiquated as a modem’s dial tone.
    — Kylie Robison, Fortune, 15 Feb. 2024
  • The implementation of control towers lack a dial tone giving business leaders a false sense of security.
    — Lora Cecere, Forbes, 15 Nov. 2021
  • Invest in supply chain operating systems to begin the journey of building a supply chain bi-directional dial tone.
    — Lora Cecere, Forbes, 15 Nov. 2021
  • Veteran apartment gropers know enough to commandeer every working telephone booth in the area using friends who listen to dial tones and weather reports for an hour before the newspapers arrive.
    — Nicholas Pileggi, Curbed, 15 Aug. 2025
  • This principle continued as time advanced, technology changed, and Internet access became the dial tone of the digital age.
    — Verne Kopytoff, Fortune, 14 Dec. 2017
  • Those that made such pleas on the airwaves were among the lucky few whose landlines still got a dial tone, or whose cell still picked up a signal — people like Zuania Capó, whose working cell phone turned her into a traveling dispatcher.
    — Jen Kirby, Daily Intelligencer, 1 Oct. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dial tone.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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