Word.ws English Dictionary

telling bone

telling bone noun: the telephone.

Noun

telling bone (plural telling bones)

  1. (humorous, preceded by definite article) The telephone.
    • “Oh great magician! Conjure more voices with thy telling bone.”1970, Richard Carpenter, Catweazle, Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, page 111
    • His eyes widened. The box contained the Divine Egg! The strange sorcerer who was muttering into the telling-bone had found lots of them.1971, Richard Carpenter, Catweazle and the Magic Zodiac, Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, page 134

Examples of telling bone in a sentence

  • Lately, Fergus has been even more insufferable: he's in love, a piece of intelligence I winkled out of the elder curmudgeon, his grandfather, the Laird of Gunning, on the telling bone last night.1985 May 12, The Canberra Times, page 22, column 1:
  • When we land I'll give you a tinkle on the telling bone.1998, The Spectator, London:
  • She's visiting her sister in Launceston and I spoke to her on the telling bone last night.2021, John Martin, Different Stripes: The first six quirky novels of the Windy Mountain series, John Martin:

Forms of telling bone

pluraltelling bones

Origin of telling bone

A Hobson-Jobson based on interpreting telephone as telling + bone; coined by British screenwriter Richard Carpenter for the TV series Catweazle.

Questions about telling bone

What does telling bone mean?
Telling bone means the telephone.
How do you use telling bone in a sentence?
Lately, Fergus has been even more insufferable: he's in love, a piece of intelligence I winkled out of the elder curmudgeon, his grandfather, the Laird of Gunning, on the telling bone last night.
What part of speech is telling bone?
Telling bone is a noun.
What is the plural of telling bone?
The plural of telling bone is telling bones.

Words near telling bone in the dictionary

  1. telling
  2. telling a story
  3. telling against
  4. telling all
  5. telling apart
  6. telling bone
  7. telling bones
  8. telling fortunes
  9. telling it like it is
  10. telling it to the hand
  11. telling its own tale

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: telling bone (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.

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Cite this entry: “telling bone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/telling_bone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.