Word.ws English Dictionary

flip phone

flip phone noun: a mobile telephone with a hinged top that is flipped open when the phone is in use.

flip phone: a mobile telephone with a hinged top that is flipped open when the phone is in use
Image: Redrum0486, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

flip phone (plural flip phones)

  1. A mobile telephone with a hinged top that is flipped open when the phone is in use.
    • Brian (Kyle Secor) tells the salesman they'll be phasing out fridges and freezers for faxes and flip phones.1992 Sept. 3, "‘Ages’ takes time to look at signposts of life at 40" (review of TV show Middle Ages), Washington Times (retrieved 18 August 2013)
    • Motorola's new flip phone doubles as a modem for your laptop.2000 April 3, “Contents: Cellular Browsing”, in Time, retrieved 18 Aug 2013

Forms of flip phone

pluralflip phones
alternative formflip-phone
alternative formflipphone

Origin of flip phone

A genericized trademark of the company Motorola for their clamshell-form mobile phones.

Words formed from flip phone

Questions about flip phone

What does flip phone mean?
Flip phone means a mobile telephone with a hinged top that is flipped open when the phone is in use.
What part of speech is flip phone?
Flip phone is a noun.
What is the plural of flip phone?
The plural of flip phone is flip phones.

Words near flip phone in the dictionary

  1. flip one's lid
  2. flip one's shit
  3. flip one's wig
  4. flip out
  5. flip over
  6. flip phone
  7. flip phones
  8. flip shit
  9. flip side
  10. flip sides
  11. flip smartphone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flip phone (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “flip phone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/flip_phone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.