soft phone
n.— «The new system will use phones known in the industry as “soft phones” because they are embedded in computers, and “everything is fully redundant, so if a line gets cut, there are no single points of failure in the system,” Mr. Cosgrove said. He said there are also plans to feed images from street cameras into the 911 call centers.» —“For $1.5 Billion, New York Plans a Much-Delayed Overhaul of 911″ by Al Baker New York Times July 3, 2007. (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...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...