Why is there letters on the phone

This is also why phones still have three-letter chunks over numbers and four letters over 9. Full words were used in order to help customers remember the telephone exchange name, and because they were easy to understand, especially for switchboard operators. Similar-sounding letters would cause confusion, so distinct names or phrases were preferred.

You can see the list of names for each telephone exchange here. Around this same time, area codes were introduced, but they were used mostly by operators and not customers. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. The iPhone dialer has letters below the numbers. Why did Apple include them on this screen? In other phones it is used for T9 keyboard or contact search. Some phone numbers are tailored to use a mnemonic "lettered" version to be more easily remembered.

Think of an insurance company running a commercial on TV and its goal is that you call their number. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. This system had to be done away with for a few reasons, one of which was due to the confusion that arose from telling someone letters that sounded like other letters, causing people to get the wrong number.

Here are just a few of the other codes:. Like many groundbreaking inventions, the telephone was created basically by accident. Alexander Graham Bell was working and experimenting with the telegraph, aiming to improve the existing technology, when he discovered in the process that the human voice, itself, could be sent to another location over a wire.

In the s when the phone company began replacing the charming prefixes with a fully numeric system, a group called the Anti-Digit Dialing League was founded. This San Francisco group mounted a light-hearted campaign against the "dehumanization" of the telephone system through the elimination of prefix names. I too liked it better when telephone exchanges had quaint names rather than lots of digits.

Telephone numbers were almost poetic. They had character. They were easier to remember.