Telemarketing is selling by telephone: a company rings people up, one after another, to try to sell them something — insurance, a credit card, a phone plan, a language course. It is the business word for the thing everyone knows and almost nobody likes.

There are two shapes to it. 'Cold calling' is ringing people who never asked to be called, working down a list. The other kind is calling people who already gave the company their number. Telemarketing also covers calls that are not straight selling — asking your opinion about a product, or calling old customers to bring them back — but selling is the heart of it.

Now the honest part, the part a dictionary line will not tell you: this word is neutral in tone but the thing itself is not. To a company, telemarketing is a department with a budget. To the person eating dinner when the phone rings, it is a nuisance. So the word sits in a strange place — flat and professional in a business plan, faintly negative in ordinary conversation. If someone says 'I did telemarketing for a year', English speakers hear a hard, badly paid job that people take when they need work.

Be careful with one thing: telemarketing means real selling by real companies. The fake calls — the ones claiming your bank account has a problem — are scam calls or fraud, not telemarketing, even though they arrive the same way.

The word is the activity. The person is a telemarketer; the place is a call centre.