Comment by Arnavion
6 years ago
It's not a "custom". The reason keypads have letters is precisely because the letters are mnemonics for the real number. This usage predates mobile phones, and is not US-specific.
They were originally used for area codes (Wikipedia lists a UK example of 0AY6, ie 0296, for Aylesbury), then later for mnemonic numbers like the one from the article. Mobile phones inherited the lettered keypad from landlines and also started using it for typing text messages.
It is definitely a custom limited to some particular countries.
Wikipedia: The use of alphanumeric codes for exchanges was abandoned in Europe when international direct dialing was introduced in the 1960s, because, for example, dialing VIC 8900 on a Danish telephone would result in a different number to dialling it on a British telephone. At the same time letters were no longer placed on the dials of new telephones.
(The very next paragraph after the one you quoted talks about how letters for European mobile phones were reintroduced some time later, now standardized so as to not have that problem.)
At any rate, the presence of lettered keypads doesn't mean people * had * to make mnemonic phone numbers with them, and it does look like (in Europe) only the UK had such numbers.
Apart from the US and UK, they might be popular in some Commonwealth countries too. I grew up in one and remember having them.
Yes, but only for SMS messages. They are not commonly used to write phone numbers (very occasionally you can see them now, but the numbers are also written below or next to them).
In the early automatic telephone years, letters were also used in the Netherlands, France, Denmark and other countries, but they fell out of use way before most people here were born, and also they were mostly (only?) used for area codes and exchange names/numbers, not subscriber numbers.
6 replies →
> This usage predates mobile phones
Indeed -- it dates back to the 1920s. At that time, phone numbers in the US started to be formed from a 2-letter exchange code followed by 5 (or sometimes 4) digits. For instance, "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (dialled 736-5000) was the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, and also the title of a 1940 hit song.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number
> was the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania
Still is!
Well, I've never seen this in Spain or any other country I've been in continental europe. It could just be that I didn't pay attention though.