What is a Reverse Phone Lookup?

A reverse phone lookup is when you reverse lookup a phone number. It's the opposite of what we used to do with phonebooks years ago. Traditionally, if you wanted to find someone's telephone number, you would go to the white pages (or yellow pages) and search for that person's name and you would find his or her phone number.

Reverse phone look up is the opposite of that

In contrast, with a reverse phone lookup, you have someone's phone number, you don't know to whom it belongs to, and you obviously want to find the name of the person that owns the phone number.

So what's the big deal about a reverse lookup?

Well the problem is that there are no reverse directories (at least in printed media). The regular phonebook has been arranged in alphabetical order of people's last names, so if you want to look at a Smith, you just go to the letter 'S' and find the 'Smith' you want by matching the name with the person's home/office address that you already know of.

Unfortunately there are no reverse directories that have been arranged by ascending/descending order of the phone number e.g. 555-123-1110 is S.G. Smith, 555-123-1111 is D.W. Doe, 555-123-1112 is L.R. Lewis etc. etc.

The internet brought the solution
Although it would be cumbersome, if not impossible, to maintain such a reverse directory on paper, it is relatively easy to do that on a virtual database. Basically once the database is setup properly, it's a matter of sorting by any parameter you want.

The best two resources for reverse phone look up

1. The White Pages Reverse Phone Lookup
2. Anywho.com