When I was about six years old, we got something new in our house. This amazing device allowed you to talk to people in other places — it was called a telephone. I mean, it was really called a telephone. If you were lucky enough to have one, you didn’t tell people you got a phone, you told them you got a telephone. You almost never hear the word telephone used anymore… there’s phone, cell phone, mobile phone, etc., but the word telephone is seldom used.
I got to wondering when telephone got shortened to just “phone.” After conducting my extensive research on the subject, I noticed that in older publications, the word telephone was shortened to ‘phone — the apostrophe used to mark where the beginning of the word had been omitted. Over some amount of time, someone obviously decided that phone (without the apostrophe) was its own word.
When I was a kid, we used words like telephone call, telephone line, telephone pole and telephone book. Today, if those things are mentioned at all, they’re phone call, phone line, phone book, etc. — the “tele” part seems to have just gone away. Of course, a lot of other abbreviations have become their own word in their own right, for example, facsimile spurned fax, microphone was shortened to mic and, especially in England, television is referred to as telly. Shortening seems fairly common, but it appears to be more common at the front of words than at the back.
Anyhow, I couldn’t determine exactly when the transition from telephone to ‘phone to just phone happened. I suspect that some people just started using the shortened version of telephone and it caught on and as for the apostrophe, the presence or absence of it in speech is meaningless anyway.
But I’m kind of happy that phone seems to have prevailed — can you imagine E.T. wanting to telephone home instead of just phone home? And how would you like to tote around an iTelephone instead of an iPhone?
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