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
-
Or send them a message saying ‘Call Me’ with just an old dial-up phone as the image.
—Chloe Schama, Vogue, 31 July 2024
-
Online friend-making has been around in some form since dial-up.
—Tatum Hunter, Washington Post, 3 July 2023
-
Ward, who is 38, remembers a dial-up connection in his home as a kid.
—Allison Aubrey, NPR, 24 Feb. 2025
-
The theatrics of it all enough to inspire Jenner to dial-up her own powers of seduction.
—Daniel Rodgers, Vogue, 26 Jan. 2024
-
Think of it like upgrading from dial-up modem speeds to broadband speeds.
—Billal Hammoud, Forbes, 29 Mar. 2024
-
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
-
If your daily-driver is a Tesla, this will seem like switching from broadband to dial-up.
—Tim Pitt, Robb Report, 10 May 2023
-
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
-
One was the availability of broadband internet, which was faster than the dial-up connections of the 1990s.
—The Conversation, Fortune, 22 Feb. 2023
-
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
-
The charming drone of a dial-up tone has been replaced by Slack pings, text message buzzes and an iPhone alarm designed to activate our fight or flight senses.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
-
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
-
The problem was his town of 1,400 people had only dial-up internet service.
—Shawn Hubler, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2023
-
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
-
Shade liked watching birds but was also listening intently to the dial-up modem’s buzz.
—Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times, 19 Jan. 2025
-
The few people who had home Internet relied on dial-up because broadband wasn’t available yet.
—Carrie Arnold, Scientific American, 15 Oct. 2024
-
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
-
Marvel Comics became a digital pioneer way back in the age of dial-up Internet.
—Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Sep. 2024
-
Pop-up ads aren’t new, as anyone who remembers dial-up internet can attest.
—Ash Parrish, The Verge, 1 Dec. 2023
-
And the connections out to remote employees become super low-bandwidth—like dial-up speed.
—Yec, Forbes, 21 Apr. 2023
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games.
—Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, 13 Mar. 2024
-
The shrill drone of dial-up is a defining feature of Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut Y2K, even if the actual sound plays only a few times throughout the comedian’s brash and lopsided film.
—Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Mar. 2024
-
The subway system still uses fragile loop cable wires that transmit data more slowly than a dial-up modem and limit the range of communication.
—Shawna Chen, Axios, 25 Oct. 2024
-
Imagine using a cutting-edge smartphone but with a dial-up Internet connection.
—Rajan Kohli, Forbes, 11 Dec. 2023
-
The days of manually searching through multiple websites could soon become as outdated as dial-up internet (Gen Z: ask your Mom).
—Sandy Carter, Forbes, 26 Nov. 2024
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.
Last Updated: