Definition of "touch-tone" [touch-tone]

• Of, relating to, or being a telephone with which the user places calls by pressing pushbuttons that generate and transmit tones of differing pitch, these tones corresponding to the digits of the number being called. (adjective)
• A touch-tone telephone. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• ""Some of the other artifacts ... included an early typewriter with a piano keyboard, an early IBM paper tape punch that made square holes (not round), an official IBM song book, early prototypes of touch-tone phones, Teletypes, Flexowriters, an early IBM time clock, manual telephone switchboards, electro-mechanical telephone switches, and music boxes.""
• "When I recharge on my mobile service I can skip all the prompts by simply pressing the sequence of touch-tone keys I know do the trick."
• "Mahesh Sharma at Australian IT reports that the bank is going to offer the option of either using voice recognition or touch-tone, depending on user preference."