bzzz-bzzz.

n.  a telephone busy signal.

<Your child comes home and calls a friend.  (You get a busy signal.)  They chat for a while (bzzz-bzzz, bzzz-bzzz).  —Carol McD. Wallace, Elbows Off the Table, Napkin in the Lap, No Video Games During Dinner: The Modern Guide to Teaching Children Good Manners.>

n.  the sharp call of the Southern Red Bishop bird, as described in Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania by Dale A. Zimmerman.

bzzz-bzzz-bzzz.

n.  a telephone “all circuits are busy” signal.

<On the day John F. Kennedy was killed, I was working in my office at the Air Force, and we had a radio on, and we heard the news.  It was just devastating.  I tried to call my husband at the National Institutes of Health, but those were government lines, and you’d pick up a phone and all you’d get was bzzz-bzzz-bzzz.  —Jackie Bolden, quoted in From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It by Joan Morrison.>

n.  the buzzing of a dentist’s drill, as in the poem “Well, Shut My Mouth” by Judith Viorst; see also bzzz.


v.  to chat excitedly.

<Jannie and I had a chance to talk the talk.  I knew she was dying to bzzz-bzzz-bzzz.  I can always tell.  She has a fine, overactive imagination, and I couldn’t wait to hear what was on her little mind.  —James Patterson, Cat & Mouse.>

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