What does callee mean?
A callee is the recipient of a call: in computing, the function or subroutine that is invoked by another piece of code, and in telephony, the party who answers or receives a telephone call. The term is built from the verb 'call' combined with the suffix '-ee', which in English reliably denotes the person or thing acted upon — the same pattern seen in 'employee' (one who is employed) or 'addressee' (one who is addressed). Its natural counterpart is 'caller', the initiator of the call, and the pair appears constantly in technical writing about call stacks, calling conventions, and communication protocols. Programmers speak of values 'passed to the callee' or of the 'callee's return address', while telecom engineers use it for routing and billing, as when charges are assigned to the callee in a collect call. Though firmly technical in register, the word is transparent once its suffix is understood, making it a tidy example of how English productively names both sides of any action.
nounIn computing and telecommunications, the function, subroutine, or person that receives a call — that is, the entity being invoked or contacted by a caller.
- The function, procedure, or subroutine invoked by a calling function in programming.
- The person or party who receives a telephone call (the called party), especially in call-routing and telephony contexts.
"When the debugger paused execution, the stack trace showed each caller and its corresponding callee."
"The compiler generates extra code at the call site to preserve registers across the callee's execution."
"In a collect call, charges are accepted by the callee rather than the caller."
Regular plural; used when discussing multiple invoked functions or called parties.
"Modern calling conventions define which registers the callees must preserve."
Every phone conversation has two halves, and programmers borrowed the word for the receiving half — the callee — straight from telephony.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of callee
The word callee was formed within English from the verb 'call' plus the suffix '-ee', borrowed via French from the Latin past-participial ending '-atus/-atum'. The '-ee' suffix entered productive English use around the early nineteenth century through legal terms such as 'employer/employee' and consistently marks the passive participant in an action. Callee emerged in twentieth-century telephony usage for the called party and was later adopted by computer science as the counterpart of 'caller'. Its closest relatives are other '-ee' formations such as 'addressee', 'appointee', and 'payee', rather than older cognates in other languages.
How callee is actually used
A technical term used mainly in computer science, software documentation, and telephony; it is rare in everyday conversation. It is formed with the agentive '-ee' suffix, which marks the recipient of an action, in contrast to 'caller', which uses the '-er' form for the initiator. In programming contexts it frequently appears in discussions of call stacks, calling conventions, and register preservation.
Easily confused with callee
The caller is the function or person initiating the call, while the callee is the one receiving it.