A beeper is a small machine you used to clip on a belt or keep in a bag. When someone needed you, it made a short, high electronic sound — a beep — and you knew you should find a phone and call them back. Doctors, repair people, and parents of teenagers carried them a lot in the 1980s and 1990s. Though actually the machine did a bit more than the tidy picture: later ones could show a short number or a tiny message, not only make a noise. In everyday American English this is the usual word; in Britain people more often said pager. You will hardly see a real beeper now, because a mobile phone does the same job and much more. Loosely, some people also call any little gadget that beeps a beeper (a kitchen timer, a truck reversing), but the core meaning is this call-me machine. It is informal and a bit dated — a word with a smell of an older time.

呼叫器（台灣早年也常叫 BB Call）。中國大陸較常說「傳呼機」。