ring-back tone
n.— «In Asia, where sales of music to mobile phones outpace CD sales in some places, labels may offer more than 400 different items in connection with a specific album, including ring-back tones—snippets of music that play to callers while they wait for their call to go through—or “color call” tones, background songs that play while someone talks on the phone.» —“Squeezing Money From the Music” by Jeff Leeds New York Times Dec. 11, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Why is it harder to talk if we don’t move our hands? Even when we’re talking on the phone we feel the need to gesture to aid communication. A new book offers a look at the relatively new field of gesture studies. And: Ever wonder why we describe the...