A silent call is a telephone call in which the calling party does not speak when the call is answered. Most such calls are generated by a cold call telemarketing operation's dialer software, which makes many calls automatically and sometimes does not have an agent immediately available to handle an answered call. As a result, the called party hears silence ("dead air"), followed by the call being disconnected.^[1] This differs from a ghost call, which is not dialed intentionally, and is due to technical issues or pocket dialing.^{[citation needed]}

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) uses the term "abandoned call" instead of silent call in its regulations applying to telemarketing.^[2]