Word.ws English Dictionary

phone tag

phone tag noun: a situation in which two individuals attempting to contact each other by telephone repeatedly do not get a live person and instead trade messages, such as by voice mail.

Noun

phone tag (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) A situation in which two individuals attempting to contact each other by telephone repeatedly do not get a live person and instead trade messages, such as by voice mail.
    • "What frequently results is a game of phone tag. One party tries to reach another, is unable to, and leaves voice-mail indicating an interest in finding a time to meet. The other party returns the call, more often than not fails to reach the original caller, and leaves voice-mail in response."2000, Sharon MacDonald, Gilbert Cockton, People and Computers XIV - Usability Or Else!: Proceedings of HCI 2000
    • "Avoid phone tag, which results when two parties go back and forth trying to reach each other by phone."2005, Dorothy A. Maxwell, Phone Skills for the Information Age
    Synonyms:
    telephone tag

Synonyms of phone tag

Origin of phone tag

phone + tag (children's game)

Questions about phone tag

What does phone tag mean?
Phone tag means a situation in which two individuals attempting to contact each other by telephone repeatedly do not get a live person and instead trade messages, such as by voice mail.
What part of speech is phone tag?
Phone tag is a noun.

Words near phone tag in the dictionary

  1. phone number
  2. phone numbers
  3. phone sex
  4. phone survey
  5. phone surveys
  6. phone tag
  7. phone tree
  8. phone trees
  9. phone up
  10. phone zombie
  11. phone zombies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phone tag (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-phone tag.ogg.

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