How to Use dial-up in a Sentence
dial-up
adjective-
The pace of change makes the dot-com era look like dial-up.
—Alex Goryachev, Forbes.com, 28 Apr. 2025
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Or send them a message saying ‘Call Me’ with just an old dial-up phone as the image.
—Chloe Schama, Vogue, 31 July 2024
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Online friend-making has been around in some form since dial-up.
—Tatum Hunter, Washington Post, 3 July 2023
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Grab your dial-up modem and strap a bra to your head, Weird Science is turning 40.
—Jordan Hoffman Updated, EW.com, 2 Aug. 2025
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Ward, who is 38, remembers a dial-up connection in his home as a kid.
—Allison Aubrey, NPR, 24 Feb. 2025
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The theatrics of it all enough to inspire Jenner to dial-up her own powers of seduction.
—Daniel Rodgers, Vogue, 26 Jan. 2024
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Think of it like upgrading from dial-up modem speeds to broadband speeds.
—Billal Hammoud, Forbes, 29 Mar. 2024
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The oldest came of age as the world made the transition to online connectivity through AOL and dial-up.
—Sebastiaan Verhaar, Forbes, 10 Mar. 2025
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If your daily-driver is a Tesla, this will seem like switching from broadband to dial-up.
—Tim Pitt, Robb Report, 10 May 2023
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These were days of dial-up modems and wired connections, when people used cellphones only to make and receive calls.
—Michael McCann, Sportico.com, 6 Jan. 2025
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One was the availability of broadband internet, which was faster than the dial-up connections of the 1990s.
—The Conversation, Fortune, 22 Feb. 2023
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Think of it less like launching a new app and more like Wall Street quietly swapping out dial-up for fiber internet.
—Eric Piscini, Forbes.com, 28 July 2025
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This was unavoidable in the age of dial-up, when the Internet connection would get disrupted any time a parent had to use the phone line.
—Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, 13 Jan. 2024
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An actual floppy disk drive for old games would have been rad, though, as would a crusty 28K modem to use for dial-up internet.
—Mitch Wallace, Forbes.com, 23 July 2025
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The charming drone of a dial-up tone has been replaced by Slack pings, text message buzzes and an iPhone alarm designed to activate our fight or flight senses.
—Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 23 Jan. 2024
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This website was around in the 1990s when online dating was done by dial-up and was heavily stigmatized.
—Sabrina Talbert, Women's Health, 15 Apr. 2023
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The problem was his town of 1,400 people had only dial-up internet service.
—Shawn Hubler, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2023
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In the ever-expanding universe of obsolete sounds, few can compare to the confident yawp of a dial-up modem.
—Adrienne Lafrance, The Atlantic, 4 Mar. 2025
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Also, as more powerful telecom connections evolved, the need for dial-up began to fade.
—Tim Bajarin, Forbes.com, 11 Aug. 2025
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Shade liked watching birds but was also listening intently to the dial-up modem’s buzz.
—Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times, 19 Jan. 2025
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The few people who had home Internet relied on dial-up because broadband wasn’t available yet.
—Carrie Arnold, Scientific American, 15 Oct. 2024
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The company is hoping the product appeals to consumers who grew up in the 1990s when LAN parties, dial-up internet, and floppy disk drives were common.
—PC Magazine, 23 July 2025
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The music goes for horror-movie ambience, building the dystopian mood with eerie samples of human screams, sobs, phone alarms, howling sax, even an old-school dial-up modem.
—Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 10 May 2025
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Marvel Comics became a digital pioneer way back in the age of dial-up Internet.
—Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Sep. 2024
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Pop-up ads aren’t new, as anyone who remembers dial-up internet can attest.
—Ash Parrish, The Verge, 1 Dec. 2023
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And the connections out to remote employees become super low-bandwidth—like dial-up speed.
—Yec, Forbes, 21 Apr. 2023
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Anyone who’s old enough to remember dial-up internet may suffer flashbacks trying to get on to some Delta 8 THC websites.
—Amber Smith, Discover Magazine, 3 Apr. 2024
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In 1993, after dial-up but before smartphones, the cartoonist Peter Steiner published a drawing in the New Yorker that would come to define the early years of life online.
—Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post, 10 July 2024
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In keeping with the era, Chalabi says the animation for the code-switch came after the team heard multiple ‘code-switch sounds’, with the dial-up sound being closest to her vision for the experience.
—Ryan Fleming, Deadline, 13 May 2025
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Having grown up in the early nineties, Andy Koh, 33, remembers the good old days before social media, when dial-up internet existed, and when phones still had a wire attached to them.
—Paul Du Quenoy, MSNBC Newsweek, 26 Mar. 2025
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dial-up.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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