telephone directories

Yellow and white

Telephone directories are books or digital databases listing telephone subscribers with their numbers and often their addresses, organized alphabetically by name or by business category.

Before the internet era, these bulky volumes arrived annually at most households, divided into white pages for residential listings and yellow pages for business advertisements.

I found a plumber in the telephone directory.

The term persists even as physical directories have largely given way to online search.

obsolete

white pages

Residential telephone directory

analog · dial tone · operator · switchboard · party line · exchange · long distance · area codes · subscriber · disconnected

reference

listings

Published directory contents

residential · commercial · business listings · index · cross-reference · reverse lookup · classified · categories · local services · advertisements

Categories
Opposites
information retrieval method

telephone directoriessearch engines

Internet lookup tools

Google · digital databases · GPS navigation · Siri · Alexa

communication technology era

telephone directoriesmobile apps

Portable device software

smartphones · cloud storage · wireless technology · social networking · instant messaging

Family

telephone, directory, phone, phoned, phones, phoning, telephoned, telephoning, telephonic

Familiarity
Top 200,000
Profile
Used worldwide · Timeless · Concrete · Everyday, not technical · Rated G