PHONECARD

noun Also written phone card or phone-card (Lifestyle and Leisure) (Science and Technology) In the UK, a plastic card (see card°) providing a specified number of units of telephone time, which may be bought in advance from any of a number of retail outlets and then used in a special call-box known as a cardphone or phonecard kiosk/phone, etc. Etymology: Formed by compounding: a card for the phone. History and Usage: Plans for a phonecard system, which would solve many of the problems with theft and vandalism that plagued coin-in-the-slot pay phones, were announced by British Telecom in 1980 (at first using the name Phonocard). A public-service trial of the system began in 1981, and within three years it was being expanded to provide several thousand more cardphone kiosks. The phonecard is inserted into a slot before dialling; a liquid crystal display on the computerized box shows the caller how many units remain to be used and what the computer is deducting for the current call. At first, the kiosks that were fitted to take the credit-card-sized phonecard were known as cardphones; by the middle of the eighties, though, the logo on the kiosks read phonecard and it seemed that British Telecom was trying to simplify things by using a single name for all the parts of the system. Colloquially, though, there is some variation; cardphone remains in use, as do synonyms for phonecard such as telephone card. There are 700 Phonecard phones in London and these are expected to be increased to around 5,000 by 1987. Ambit Sept. 1985, p. 8 Subscribers will be sent a 'smart' card--a bit like a phonecard--which switches on the decoder. Which? Sept. 1989, p. 444 He went into an Indian grocery and provided himself with a telephone card and a stack of change. He walked over Putney Bridge and into Fulham, where he found a cardphone box that had to be functioning because it had a long queue. He waited. Two people, a black man and a white woman, exhausted their cards. Antonia Byatt Possession (1990), p. 327