phreak

Note: Both phone phreak and the shortening phreak came into general use in print media following their occurrence in the article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire, October, 1971, pp. 116-125, 222-226. The compound appeared slightly earlier following the arrest of four people in Chester County, Pennsylvania, for illicit use of long-distance telephone lines (George Murray, "4 'Phone Phreak' Suspects Seized as Dial Dodgers," Philadelphia Enquirer, September 29, 1971). The choice of the word freak by the people engaged in such activity has been explained as a punning reference to free call or to frequency. In an article that appeared shortly after the Esquire piece (Maureen Orth, "For Whom Ma Bell Tolls Not," Los Angeles Times magazine, October 31, 1971) the collocation is spelled phone freak.