Word.ws English Dictionary

phone bank

phone bank noun: a collection of telephones within an organization such as a call center.

Noun

phone bank (plural phone banks)

  1. A collection of telephones within an organization such as a call center.
    • When the hosts of "Good Day" offered viewers a chance to call in their comments, the number of calls overloaded the phone banks.1985 April 20, Christine Guilfoy, “Talkshow Cancels Editors of Lesbian Nuns”, in Gay Community News, page 1
  2. A banking institution that does business solely or mostly via telephone.
  3. A political outreach event or strategy that involves making calls to potential voters by phone to get out the vote or collect voter data.
    • Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hosted a phone bank for [Angela] Alsobrooks that same day, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) led canvassing to support her in Baltimore last week.2024 October 4, Katie Shepherd, “Obama backs Alsobrooks, says Senate control ‘could come down’ to Md.”, in The Washington Post

Verb

phone bank (third-person singular simple present phone banks, present participle phone banking, simple past and past participle phone banked)

  1. (ambitransitive) To engage in a phone bank (“political outreach event that involves making calls to potential voters by phone”).
    • Social workers phone banked for the bill from NASW headquarters, and Legislative Alert mailings were sent to hundreds of social workers at each step of the legislative process when calls and letters were critical.1988 February 21, Sherry Zitter, “Thank You NASW”, in Gay Community News, volume 15, number 31, page 4

Forms of phone bank

Noun
pluralphone banks
alternative formphonebank
alternative formphone-bank
Verb
third-person singular presentphone banks
present participlephone banking
past participlephone banked
pastphone banked

Questions about phone bank

What does phone bank mean?
Phone bank means a collection of telephones within an organization such as a call center.
What part of speech is phone bank?
Phone bank can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of phone bank?
The plural of phone bank is phone banks.

Words near phone bank in the dictionary

  1. phonautographic
  2. phonautographically
  3. phonautographs
  4. phone
  5. phone ahead
  6. phone bank
  7. phone banks
  8. phone book
  9. phone books
  10. phone booth
  11. phone booths

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phone bank (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: “phone bank.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/phone_bank. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.