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This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 14 January 2025. This is a list of onomatopoeias, i.e. words that imitate, resemble, or suggest the source of the sound that they describe. For more information, see the linked articles. Human vocal sounds Achoo, Atishoo, the sound of a sneeze Ahem, a sound made to clear the throat or to draw attention ...
A busy signal (or busy tone or engaged tone) in telephony is an audible call-progress tone or audible signal to the calling party that indicates failure to complete the requested connection of that particular telephone call. The busy signal has become less common in the past few decades due to the prevalence of call waiting and voicemail.
In many cases, when calling from abroad, busy, reorder and other call failure tones may be played by the local switch. Modern signalling protocols like SS7 send this information digitally; thus only a ringback tone or announcement generated by a distant switch in a foreign network will ever be heard by callers from other countries or networks.
When the call routing is successful and the receiving telephone is not already in a call, the destination telephone receives an electrical signal, called power ringing, or the ring tone, to alert the recipient of the incoming call. During this period of alerting, the caller also receives a distinctive signal, audible ringing, also called ...
The symbolic properties of a sound in a word, or a phoneme, is related to a sound in an environment, and are restricted in part by a language's own phonetic inventory, hence why many languages can have distinct onomatopoeia for the same natural sound. Depending on a language's connection to a sound's meaning, that language's onomatopoeia ...
A soft dial tone or express dial tone may be used when no actual service is active on a line, and normal calls cannot be made. It is maintained only so that an attached phone can dial the emergency telephone number (such as 911, 112 or 999), in compliance with the law in most places.
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The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet used to denote the sibilant sounds in these words are, respectively, [s] [z] [ʃ] [ʒ]. Sibilants have a characteristically intense sound, which accounts for their paralinguistic use in getting one's attention (e.g. calling someone using "psst!" or quieting someone using "shhhh!").