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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

"Telephone directory" is a term that pretty much no one uses for phonebook.

Unless you're an expert on worldwide English use, it's best not to make such sweeping generalizations.

A straightforward search for the term brings up large sites in the UK, India, Malta and Hong Kong. "Directory Enquiries" was (is?) the name for the service in the UK where you pay a fee for someone to look in the telephone directory for you.

Yes, but the heavy paper copy that used to periodically plop through everyones letterbox, was called The Phone Book[0].

[0] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51uCASmsWxL...

I’m not sure what the GP means by it being the metaphor to replace phone book (“contacts app” would be my off-the-cuff suggestion), but I’m not that old and I’ve heard it referred to as a directory. I haven’t heard it recently, but that has more to do with the disuse of phone books, I think. Maybe it’s a regional thing?

>Maybe it’s a regional thing?

That is probably fair. Anywhere I've lived in the US, someone would know (well, maybe not if they were young enough) what you meant by "telephone directory" but almost everyone would say "phonebook" at least in casual conversation. It's also true that when you would dial 411 for a number, that was called directory assistance. (And a listing of phone numbers for the staff in an organization would probably be called a staff directory or a telephone directory or something along those lines.)

Tell that to Active Directory.

I'm a 90s kid. From India. Always called it Telephone Directory. We also called it Yellow Pages.

In the US, in larger cities, you'd have separate "white pages" (aka the phonebook) which lists just names and addresses and "yellow pages" which had business listings and ads. In smaller locations, they were often combined into one with both white pages and yellow pages in the same book.

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