telegram
Example Sentences
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At the time, the Tana family was vacationing on a remote Yugoslav island when a telegram arrived: “The restaurant burned down. Call me, Pearl,” recalls Katerina Tana, one of Dan Tana’s daughters.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 14, 2026
Within hours of carrying the first telegram across the English Channel in 1850, the earliest “submarine telegraph”—27 miles of copper wire wrapped in a rubbery substance called gutta percha—was broken by a fishing trawler.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 4, 2026
"The telegram boy said, 'I'm sorry to tell you, but this is bad news'," he says.
From BBC ● Aug. 11, 2025
A telegram in the same files shows a doctor from Cornwall, who was treating a 10-year-old child in 1944, pleading with the authorities for the medicine: "No hope without penicillin".
From BBC ● Jun. 5, 2025
About half an hour after we had received Mrs. Harker’s telegram, there came a quiet, resolute knock at the hall door.
From "Dracula" by Bram Stoker
Officials said the message had left Downing Street correctly but blamed an error in transmission and suggested telegrams should be abandoned altogether.
From BBC ● Dec. 29, 2025
There, Susan met Giorgos Xenarios, a goldsmith and jewelry maker 27 years her senior who, after many love letters, telegrams, intercontinental trips and one very firm ultimatum, migrated to the U.S. in 1974.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 2025
At its center, a young, unnamed telegraph operator watches as the beautiful, married Lady Bradeen sends flurries of telegrams, hoping that no one will notice the messages to the dashing Captain Everard.
From Slate ● May 27, 2024
“I’ve gotten thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me.”
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 11, 2024
The Federal Communications Commission received more than six hundred letters and telegrams about the War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
From "Spooked!" by Gail Jarrow
Toward the end of 1926, Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who would co-father “Citizen Kane,” telegrammed his friend Ben Hecht, the newspaperman who was finding himself between gigs and behind on his rent.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 11, 2023
“I didn’t know what to do with myself. I telegrammed back saying there was no way I wanted to be connected to that show.”
From New York Times ● Mar. 9, 2023
Nesbit had a serious relationship with the author Donald Barthelme before she married Gilman, and one day, Barthelme telegrammed her from Europe.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 14, 2023
At one point, after the mega-success of the "Ringo" LP, no less than John Lennon famously telegrammed Starr, saying “Congratulations. How dare you? And please write me a hit song.”
From Salon ● Oct. 25, 2019
Mrs. Guinea had telegrammed, "Is there a boy in the case?"
From "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
In 1916, Charles Evans Hughes waited two weeks before telegramming his concession to Woodrow Wilson, who noted that the message was “a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”
From Slate ● Nov. 7, 2012
Vocabulary lists containing telegram
Write On!: Graph and Gram
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Far and Away: Tele
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The Red Umbrella
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