5 ms·
Sorry for the unrelated question, but I'm not from the US and I'm curious, what does this mean? 844-NYTNEWS Do landlines phones have letters in the US? Is it
by iagovar 6y ago
Sorry for the unrelated question, but I'm not from the US and I'm curious, what does this mean?
844-NYTNEWS
Do landlines phones have letters in the US? Is it pressing a number several times?
And also mentioning that I'm grateful for SSC to exist. I rarely comment but it's a refreshing community.
- tschwimmer 6y agoYou may find this relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#Letter_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#Letter_mappin...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alias_neo 6y agoYou press the number on the dial pad which also has the letter in question. Just once. This is just a popular (in the US?) way to make numbers easier to remember.
- iagovar 6y agoI see, so it's not like in the old mobile phones where you have to press a bunch of times to get a letter, just once. It's a clever custom.
- Arnavion 6y agoIt'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.
- gpvos 6y agoIt 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.
- Arnavion 6y 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 6y agoYes, 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.
- stouset 6y agoMobile phones took this cue from telephones, which have had this kind of notion of an associated set of alphabetic characters since at least the eighties or nineties.
- Arnavion 6y agoSince the 1920s actually, for the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#United_States >In the most areas of North America, telephone numbers in metropolitan communities consisted of a combination of digits and letters, starting in the 1920s until the 1960s. Letters were translated to dialed digits, a mapping that was displayed directly on the telephone dial.
- gpvos 6y agoMuch earlier. Except that in most of the world they fell out of use before telephones became a common household item, so for people who grew up between, very roughly, the 60s and early 90s, mobile phones were the first phones with letters on them. We had heard about those strange phone "numbers" with letters in them via American television shows, of course.
- stouset 6y agoYep, apologies if I wasn't clear. I said "at least" since the late eighties and nineties since that's around when I first became coherent enough of a human to notice. I didn't intend it to be interpreted as "around" the eighties and nineties.
- beaner 6y agoYou're thinking of T9, which is for typing text. When you dial 800-AAAAAAA, you're not typing, you're dialing. The "A" character is just on the same button as the "2". So when you press "A" seven times you're really pressing "2" seven times. You end up dialing 800-2222222. There's nothing funny happening, "A" is just another symbol printed on the "2" button.
- StavrosK 6y agoI think your example would be better if you used B, as A only takes a single press in T9.
- arrrg 6y agoThis refers to the letters that are on phone keypads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#/media/File:Telephone_keys.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#/media/File:T...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 6y ago1 | 2 | 3 | ABC | DEF -----|-----|----- 4 | 5 | 6 GHI | JKL | MNO -----|-----|----- 7 | 8 | 9 PQRS | TUV | WXYZ -----|-----|----- * | 0 | # | + | Now 0800-INFO becomes 0800-4636 — you just press the key corresponding to the letter once.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kd5bjo 6y agoYour chart isn’t quite right— Q and Z aren’t (or weren’t) generally present: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#/media/File%3ATelephone-annees-60-p1010020.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#/media/File...
- eythian 6y agoDepends, I used to have one of these: https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=114839 https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=114... Though the chart is still wrong according to that, however it (the chart) does match what my Android phone's dialer looks like.
- dredmorbius 6y agothe Q & Z assignments shown are typical. That said, few text-based phone numbers include these characters, for the obvious reason.
- kps 6y agoYou're correct, which appropriately enough is why you're downvoted. The letters were placed on telephone dials when telephone ‘numbers’ used a mnemonic exchange+digits format¹, so there was no requirement to include the entire alphabet. Advertising mnemonics like the one in the grandparent comment came later, and entering arbitrary text such as names, which actually requires the whole alphabet, much later. ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thinkingemote 6y agomobile phones have letters on their dial pads also.