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Pronunciations for hexadecimal numbers (1968)
- almostdigital 7y agobetty oh-bet
- jimmcslim 7y agoSee also http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-to-pronounce-hexadecimal/ http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-to-pronounce-hexadecimal/
- roland35 7y agoI was about to post the same link! In case you didn't click the link it is from the show Silicon Valley and has the following number words: 0xA_ : Atta 0xB_ : Bibbity 0xC_ : City 0xD_ : Dickety 0xE_ : Ebbity 0xE_ : Fleventy
- ChrisArchitect 7y agoha, great link -- here's another version of the clip from the article that isn't region blocked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFzze2o_NYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFzze2o_NYY
- dasyatidprime 7y agoThe extra digit names flow well, but I think shoehorning it into the same constructions English decimal numbers use doesn't, mostly because the “-ty”/“-teen” suffixes are too tied both etymologically and phonetically to being “ten”. If I say the word “eighteen”, making it 0x18 in one context and XVIII in another is close in plausible applicability and far in exact meaning, which is about the worst case for avoiding misunderstandings. In fact I have a vague recollection of my computer architecture instructor back in undergrad warning us about exactly that regarding hexadecimal numbers: do not ever be tempted to pronounce them as though they were decimal, even if all the digits fit into the pattern. There might be ways to fix that with variants of those suffixes, though my first thought of “-xy”/“-xeen” might be too hard to distinguish in a noisy auditory environment.
- 1wd 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#Verbal_and_digital_representations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#Verbal_and_digital... "An additional naming system has been published online by S. R. Rogers in 2007[21] that tries to make the verbal representation distiguishable in any case, even when the actual number does not contain numbers A-F. Examples are listed in the tables below." "1743 one-thousek-seven-hundrek-fourtek-three"
- romwell 7y agoFine, but is it an imperial thousek, or a metric one?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ddingus 7y agoIs imperial thou = 1024?
- reaperducer 7y agoNo, an imperial thousand is 1066.
- faissaloo 7y agoIt can get especially bad when you have to deal with atee vs eighty or eighteen vs ateen
- mc32 7y agoIsn’t an issue what the words for numbers mean? Does thousand mean the quantity itself or does it mean the decimal 1000? In other words thousand = 1000 (dec) and 0x3E8 (hex). Are they both pronounced “thousand”? When someone says mix a thousand liters of glycol with ten kilograms of salt, both 1000 (dec) and 0x3E8 (hex) mean “thousand” each of something. The only way to get around this is if every whole number on the number line had a unique name and could be represented by any numbering system.
- dejj 7y agoDid you notice the line "A01C annty christeen". I thought 616 (268 base 16) was that number. We need to talk.
- userbinator 7y agoThat might be one of the earliest examples of someone trying to give names to hex numbers (if I remember correctly, Knuth's TAoCP might've also contained one), but this is one of the earlier pages I remember coming across on the Internet about it: http://www.intuitor.com/hex/words.html http://www.intuitor.com/hex/words.html
- gurtwo 7y agoAC is annty-christ
- ddingus 7y agoOf course it is! I never knew of these. Such a computing lire, gem. I am going to say these first chance I get.
- noonespecial 7y agoStay F0 out there...
- ARandomerDude 7y agoIt's amazing how so many people who "don't" believe in God blaspheme at the earliest opportunity.
- castratikron 7y agoI'll pronounce numbers like 0xF000 as "F thousand"
- damien_brooklyn 7y agoMe and my children embrace this now.
- hcrisp 7y agoOk, but I'm still pronouncing DEADF007 as "dead foot".
- iNate2000 7y agoDidn't Malcolm Gladwell talk about how the Chinese names for numbers were were closer to their place values and therefore less confusing for calculations? e.g. "50" is "five-tens" instead of "fifty"
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoYou tell us!
- samch 7y agoYes, in Mandarin, the number 5 is wǔ (五), and the number 10 is shí (十). The number 50 is written as 五十 (I tend to read it as 5*10, or “five-tens” as you put it). I think it makes some simple math concepts easier to understand.
- aloisdg 7y agoEsperanto uses a similar system: 5 is kvin and 10 is dek so 50 is kvindek. If you know how to count to 10, you know how to count to 99. 100 is cent, so 500 is kvincent. 505 is kvincent kvin and 555 is kvincent kvindek kvin. Alright, now you know how to count to 999. A "number to Esperanto" is a great exercise to code and Esperanto is a lovely language to learn. Try it!
- taejo 7y agoThere was a programme where primary-school kids were taught Esperanto as their first foreign language for a year, before switching to French for N years. Not only did those in the programme speak better French at the end than those who had learnt French for the whole N+1 years (which was the hypothesis being tested) but it was also found that many of the kids translated arithmetic problems into Esperanto before solving them and translating the answers back into English.
- interfixus 7y agoQue? "Fifty" is "five-tens", numerically, semantically, and etymologically.
- sjrd 7y agoIn French, and more specifically French as spoken in some areas in Switzerland, there is a very natural way of pronouncing hex numbers: 1 to F are the normal 'un' to 'quinze'. A is 'dix'. 10 is 'seize'. 11 is 'seize et un' etc. Until 1F which is `seize et quinze'. 20 to 2F are 'vingt' until 'vingt et quinze'. Etc. 70, 80 and 90 are called 'septante', 'huitante' (Swiss-specific) and 'nonante'. A0 is 'dixante', then we have 'onzante', 'douzante', 'treizante', 'quatorzante' and 'quinzante'. 100 is 'cent', and from there normal rules apply. Etc. So B78D would be 'onze mille sept cents huitante treize'. Note that 'soixante dix' is 6A, not 70.
- Signez 7y agoLet's note that this fall apart in Metropolitan French, where we don't say neither « septante » for 70, nor « nonante » for 90 (and even less « huitante » for 80), but « soixante-dix » for 70, « quatre-vingt » for 80 and « quatre-vingt-dix » for 90. It's quite a shame, because that solution for reading hexadecimal numbers out loud is quite elegant :)
- Tharkun 7y agoBelgian French uses septante/nonante. Huitante would be a great addition.
- tasogare 7y agoI personally prefer octante. Septante and huitante sounds to much like just slapping -tante to 7 and 8. And just to be coherent, I would love to have heptante for 70.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- FoeNyx 7y ago"septante", "octante", "nonante" would be coherently based on Latin etymons, but if you want to coherently use "heptante", which relies on a Greek etymon, you should probably also use "ennéante" in lieu of "nonante".
- jacksonj04 7y agoThere's got to be some origin for those particular names - were they just lab partners or something? I need to know!
- lizzard 7y agoLast night I wrote to Robert Magnusson (the author of the 1968 article) to ask him. Hope he writes back!
- Zenst 7y agoIt's amazing what naming conventions are used over time. In the 70's/early 80's "~" was (at least in programming circles in the UK) called a swan-hyphen, today it is often called a tilde. Though I'm sure it has many other names that have come and gone throughout the fashion of time.
- xomateix 7y agoIn Spanish most people call it "tilde" as well, but you can also call it "Virgulilla" [1]. I always call it like this just because of how it sounds, love that word. [1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgulilla https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgulilla
- teddyh 7y agoA fact which may be related is that Unicode contains a character which is in effect a lengthened tilde character, called U+2053 SWUNG DASH: ⁓ Therefore, might your “swan hyphen” be a corruption of an original term “swung hyphen”?
- Zenst 7y agoInteresting, it may well have some bearing upon the UNICODE naming which came about in 1991, which would be around the time that it's usage for "~" seemed to wane out of use. "#" was another one with many names that have consolidated over time, been decades since heard anybody refer to it as a checkerboard, which was never as elegant and can see why "hash" became the norm.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoBell Telephone videos around the time touch tone dialing was introduced called it the tictactoe symbol. Seemed like a rather informal name from such a formal organization but I guess they wanted something that all of the public would know.
- reaperducer 7y agoUnless it's on twitter, it's still either a "pound" or "octothorp" to me, depending on context. Hash is a breakfast food.
- mhugo 7y agoRemind me of Boby's "bibi-binary" :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibi-binary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibi-binary
- reaperducer 7y agoI'll have to tell my A01C about these. And while we're talking hex semantics, is it just me being old, or do lower case letters in hex values bother anyone else? The only time I've been OK with this is when I've had to work with machines that only have seven-segment displays.
- joombaga 7y agoI prefer lower case. The height difference makes the letters easier to read IMO.
- XaspR8d 7y agoI tend to prefer lowercase since it reduces the number of confusable characters, especially in handwriting (8/B, 0/D, 4/A), but I can understand that numbers might typographically or semantically feel uppercase, so lowercase A-F creates a MIxEd cASe looK. Is uppercase the older tradition? I'm ~30yo and I've been seeing both for as long as I remember.
- reaperducer 7y agoIn my experience, it was always upper case until around the time CSS was introduced. The article pictured has it in upper case and it's from 1968.
- Izkata 7y agoHTML was as well, before CSS became commonplace. I still reflexively do it on occasion when writing a root page (html/head/title/body tags).
- kps 7y agoMost hardware was upper-case-only until the '60s — being descended from upper-case-only accounting cards and/or teleprinters.
- psc2 7y agoRFC 5952: A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation says "The characters "a", "b", "c", "d", "e", and "f" in an IPv6 address MUST be represented in lowercase "[1] One Reason for this, is that it can avoid redundancy if you submit a hexdecimal nummber by phone. "However, when a letter is spelled uppercase,people tend to specify that it is uppercase, which is unnecessary information."[2] If you care about typography and think mixing lower-case letters with upper-case numbers, you could argue, that oldstyle numbners aka. lower-case numbers could be a better fit. [1]https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5952#section-4.3 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5952#section-4.3 [2]https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5952#section-3.3.3 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5952#section-3.3.3
- dekhn 7y agowondering if anybody gets the hanky code reference in the tweet.
- lizzard 7y agoWell, a lot of San Francisco did, anyway!
- bjackman 7y agoMuch less interesting but I've worked in teams where "zillion" is a shorthand for "followed by all the zeroes that fit in a word of the size we're talking about". So 8 zillion is 0x80000000 if we're talking about a 32 bit address space.
- metalliqaz 7y agoi'm stealing that
- evanb 7y agoThat's weird because 3 zillion is more than 28 zillion.
- oh_sigh 7y agoYou could have enforced reduction rules so that the only valid zillion value is [0-F].[0-F]...
- beefield 7y agoAnd one zillion equals ten zillions...
- codetrotter 7y agoAnd also one hundred zillions, and even one zillion zillions.
- manojlds 7y agoYeah ok, we got thay from the parent comment.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zzo38computer 7y agoIf you use the Rogers system rather than the Magnusson system then it is not equal, I think.
- jl6 7y agoWonder why they let “Ernest” into this scheme, with two syllables when all the others have one.
- albertsondev 7y agoWonder why they let "Seven" into this scheme, with two syllables when all the others have one.
- lizzard 7y agoI wrote to the author of the system last night to ask him the backstory behind the names. Maybe his colleagues, friends, siblings - I hope he writes me back to tell the story!
- zzo38computer 7y agoI don't like this system so much, but there are other systems for hexadecimal pronouncing. I like the hex intuitor system, which uses "tex" for 0x10 and "ten" for 0xA. I have also seen other systems of representing the digits for hexadecimal, such as Nystrom's system (which also includes pronounciation). And now, looking at Wikipedia, there are more. (The hex intuitor system I mentioned above is also called the Rogers system.)
- akkartik 7y agohttp://www.intuitor.com/hex/words.html http://www.intuitor.com/hex/words.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_system Do you have more links?
- detay 7y agothis is so impractical
- countryqt30 7y agoI totally fail the point of this article. Why not just say A, B, C, D, E, F as the letters that they are? Works perfectly fine. 1F is just a two-syllable word. Just like "fiftysix" is.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoBecause there is a shed that needs to be biked.
- gnulinux 7y agoSimply because people love bikeshedding naming conventions. At this point, naming is just an engineering meme.
- combatentropy 7y agoIs it to better distinguish them, like the phonetic alphabet? These letters all rhyme: B, C, D, and E. "Did you say 1B or 1D?"
- Izkata 7y agoIsn't "fif-ty-six" three syllables?
- bscphil 7y agoI agree with you, sort of, in that if we're inventing a new system we may as well make it more intuitive for base 0x10 numbers while we're at it. At the very least we need something like the thousands separator, otherwise something like 0x10000000 becomes very difficult to say. Perhaps just use "word" as the suffix for (2^4)^4 sized groups. [1] And then "biword", "triword", "quadword", etc. So 0x10000000 would become "one aught aught aught word". But then you start to see the advantage of named systems, because you end up saying "aught" or "zero" a lot to distinguish "0xA" from "0xA0" within words. "A salary of one aught aught word" doesn't seem as easy to me as "a salary of one hundred thousand". So perhaps something ought to be done about 0x10 and 0x100, even if we only use them in situations that can be abbreviated like that. Maybe 0x10 is "hex", so "base 0x10" becomes literally read as "base hex". [1] Of course this fixes a meaning for how many bytes are in a word, which a lot of people aren't going to be happy with. ;-)
- starpilot 7y agothis is cursed.
- thanhhaimai 7y agoWould anyone please help me understand the benefits of this? :). This approach (and other approaches proposed in this thread) seems to add complexity but it's not that much better than just reading the characters normally. > B78D would be 'onze mille sept cents huitante treize' Or just read it: B, 7, 8, D. To space out a long hex number, read it in group of 4, with a pause. The approach, other than it's not being shorter, also risks miscommunication due to the receiver might not be familiar with it, or due to the sound system has multiple very similar sounds (but totally will change the meaning when misheard) like -teen and -ty.
- apocolyps6 7y agoDon't you think that's a bit of a strawman? The user is explaining how that number is pronounced in their native Swiss French. Clearly nobody is suggesting you have to learn French to say some numbers.
- thanhhaimai 7y agoI think this might be the disconnect between us. From my point of view as a non-native English speaker, the approach proposed in the tweet and that Swiss French system both requires the user to learn a new system. To me, both of that carry more drawbacks than just reading the hex character by character, in a group of 4. I can give an example using the system in the tweet: 2F3E: twenty frost thirty ernest -- longer to read, 7 sounds. 2F3E: 2, F, 3, E -- shorter to read, 4 sounds. Looking at that, I don't see the benefits and trade offs of that new complexity, and that's why I asked for help :)
- mjevans 7y agoI also prefer just reading off the short version; either in sets of (up to) 4 or 2, depending on the application. For a mac address I'd not summarize and just read it off in 6 pairs. For the example representation address on the wikipedia page... 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address ) Two Zero Zero One Colon Delta Bravo Eight Colon Eight Five Alpha Three Colon (pause) Colon Eight Alpha Two Echo Colon Three Seven Zero Colon Seven Three Three Four. The part in the middle might need a better way of announcing, but given the double digits in other parts of the address it seems more natural to read it as a string of characters than to alter it.
- kazinator 7y agoThese are quite silly things. Firstly, why invent words instead of just using the ltters. Obviously A creates an ambiguity with "eight", but other than that, things are fine. Perhaps A should be "aye". The "teen" suffix is wrong; it specifically means "ten". For instance thirteen means three+ten, so it is inappropriate to pronounce 0x13 as "thirteen". So that is to say, the pronunciation issue does not begin at 1A; we shouldn't call 0x19 "nineteen", but something else. Similarly 0x30 shouldn't be "thirty" because that word means three times ten. There shouldn't be any common words between hex pronunciation and decimal that denote a different integer. If we say "hundred" and the context is really clear, it can be understood as 0x100, but the context isn't always clear. Attaching "hex" after every ambiguous wording ("hundred thirty-one hex" for 0x131) is verbose. How about: 8: eight 9: nine A: aye B: bee C: cee ... F: eff 10: hex 11: heven 12: helve 13: thirex 14: forex 15: fivex 16: sixex 17: sevex 18: eightex 19: ninex 1A: ayex 1B: behex .. 1F: efex 20: twexy 30: trixy 40: foxy 50: fixy 60: sixy 70: sepsy 80: oxy 90: noxy A0: ayesy B0: beezy C0: ceezy D0: deezy E0: eezy F0: efzy 100: hent (from "cent") 1000: hil (from "mil") 10000: han (from 万 (man)) 100000000: hoku (from 億 (oku)) 0xDEADBEEF: deezy-ee-hent ayesy-dee han beezy-ee-hent eezy-eff. 0xF00FCBB0: efzy-hent-eff han, ceezy-bee-hent beezy.
- agalunar 7y agoSome friends and I wrote something similar as satire during undergrad. It’s ridiculous, but I was (and still am) pleased how it rolls off the tongue. http://web.mit.edu/kade/www/misc/ieee4919.pdf http://web.mit.edu/kade/www/misc/ieee4919.pdf
- entwife 7y agoThis appears to confuse the representation of a number, with the quantity it represents.
- michelinman 7y ago010000101101001011011100110000101110010011 110010010000001101001011100110010000001101 101011101010110001101101000001000000110010 101100001011100110110100101100101011100100 010000100100000010000100110010101101110011 001000110010101110010001000000111001001110 10101101100011001010111001100100001
- segmondy 7y agoThere was a time when people programmed by hex and punched in code using strictly hex keyboard. I suppose this is what it was, even in the 90's, the heath kits were hex only.
- FoeNyx 7y agoAlso in 1968, the french singer — and hobbyist mathematician — Boby Lapointe ¹ proposed a graphical representation and pronunciation system for hexadecimal numbers, named bibi-binary ². The pronunciation part is based on the combinations of 4 consonants (HBKD) with 4 vowels (OAEI). It's probably less practical than a system relying on similarities with words for native numbers, but it was probably more of an artsy experiment and it produces shorter (and maybe funnier) results. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boby_Lapointe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boby_Lapointe ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibi-binary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibi-binary