Telephone Directory

In telephony, a telephone directory is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organisation that publishes the directory. Subscriber names are generally listed in alphabetical order, together with their postal or street address and telephone number. It can be published in hard copy or in electronic form.

In the U.S., courts have ruled (in Feist v. Rural) that telephone companies do not have a copyright on telephone listings, which has meant availability of innovative telephone directory services on CD-ROM and the World Wide Web.

A telephone directory may also provide instructions about how to use the telephone service in the local area, may give important numbers for emergency services, utilities, hospitals, doctors, and organisations who can provide support in times of personal crisis. It may also have civil defence or emergency management information as well as advertising.

A telephone directory may also be called a phone book or may be known by the colour of the paper it is printed on.

White pages generally indicates personal or alphabetic listings.
Yellow pages generally indicates a business directory classified by business type or services provided, often with paid advertising.
Other colours may have other meanings: For example blue is used for government listings in some countries, green is sometimes used for government agencies.

A reverse directory, or criss-cross directory, is a telephone directory in which the entries are in in order by address (first by city, then by street, then by house number), and were used to find out the name of a subscriber with a particular address or to find the neighbors of a particular address. They were fairly common until the 1960s as a separately published book, or sometimes included at the back of the regular telephone directory with each section on a different colour paper. Printed reverse directories have become less common with the availability of telephone databases on CD-ROM and on the Internet with advanced searching features.

They are not well known to the general public since they have generally been available on a limited basis to telephone companies or government officials, although genealogists and private investigators know which public libraries have them in their collection. In addition, some telephone companies have made the information generally available through little known services, such as the "2080 service" in Chicago (now discontinued), where a call to the exchange and the number 2080 produced an operator who would give the name and address of any other number in that exchange.

Compare with:

DNS
Whois
LDAP

Commercial Usage: Telephone Directory

Domain	Title
Books	Job Hotlines USA: The National Telephone Directory of Employer Joblines 1994-95 (3rd Ed) (reference) Transmit 95: Visual Telephone Directory (reference) International Telephone Directory of Tdd Users (reference) (more book examples)

Periodicals	Airdrie Cochrane & Area Telephone Directory (reference) Electronic Industry Telephone Directory : Buyers Ed (reference) Telephone Directory (reference) Telephone Directory = Repertoire Telephonique (reference) United States Senate Telephone Directory (reference) (more periodical examples)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

Familiar Quotations: Telephone Directory

Non-Fiction Usage: Telephone Directory

Subject	Topic	Quote
Health		Local affiliates can be found in the telephone directory or through the national office. (references)
		Look in your local telephone directory for a laboratory or cooperative extension that offers water testing. (references)
		A private, voluntary organization that distributes literature on heart disease and how to prevent it. Local affiliates can be found in the telephone directory. (references)
Business		Please contact the nearest US Department of Commerce Export Assistance Center, (listed in the government pages of your telephone directory) for further details on these services. (references)
Economic History	France	The number can be found in the US government pages of your telephone directory, or you may call 1-800-USA-TRADE. (references)
Travel	Taiwan	More detailed information concerning these firms can be obtained by consulting the telephone directory or one of the many privately published business directories available on the island. (references)
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits.

Modern Translations: Telephone Directory

Language		Translations for "telephone directory"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses.
Albanian		libër telefonash (telephone book). (various references)

Arabic		‏دليل التليفون. (various references)

Bulgarian		телефонен указател (directory, telephone book). (various references)

Czech		telefonní seznam (phone book, telephone book). (various references)

Danish		telefonbog. (various references)

Dutch		telefoongids, telefoonboek (phone book). (various references)

Finnish		puhelinluettelo. (various references)

French		annuaire (telephone book). (various references)

German		Telefonbuch (directory, phone book, telephone book), Teilnehmerverzeichnis (directory, directory system). (various references)

Greek		τηλεφωνικός κατάλογος (directory). (various references)

Hungarian		telefonkönyv (directory, telephone book). (various references)

Italian		elenco telefonico (directory, phone book), annuario telefonico. (various references)

Japanese Kanji		職業別電話帳 (classified telephone directory). (various references)

Japanese Katakana		しょくぎょうべつで�"わちょう (classified telephone directory). (various references)

Manx		lioar chellvane. (various references)

Pig Latin		elephonetay irectoryday.(various references)

Portuguese		lista telefónica, lista telefônica (directory, yellow pages), catálogo telefônico, anuário dos telefones. (various references)

Romanian		carte de telefon (directory). (various references)

Russian		телефонный справочник (telephone book). (various references)

Serbo-Croatian		telefonski imenik (telephone book). (various references)

Spanish		guía telefónica (directory, phone book, telephone book). (various references)

Swedish		telefonkatalog (directory, telephone book, yellow pages). (various references)

Turkish		telefon rehberi (directory, telephone book, yellow pages). (various references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references.

Anagrams: Telephone Directory

Alternative Orthography: Telephone Directory

Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)

54 65 6C 65 70 68 6F 6E 65 44 69 72 65 63 74 6F 72 79

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)

Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)

01010100 01100101 01101100 01100101 01110000 01101000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01000100 01101001 01110010 01100101 01100011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001

HTML Code (1990) (references)

&#84 &#101 &#108 &#101 &#112 &#104 &#111 &#110 &#101 &#32 &#68 &#105 &#114 &#101 &#99 &#116 &#111 &#114 &#121

ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)

0054 0065 006C 0065 0070 0068 006F 006E 0065 0044 0069 0072 0065 0063 0074 006F 0072 0079

Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)

Author	Quotation
Donald Sinden	An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references.

Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams
	Words within the letters "c-d-e-e-e-e-h-i-l-n-o-o-p-r-r-t-t-y"
	-4 letters: interelectrode.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro.

Telephone Directory

Definition: Telephone Directory