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Comment by gpvos

6 years ago

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.

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gpvos

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Arnavion  6 years ago

(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.

  • gpvos  6 years ago

    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.