[{"id":247915,"date":"2026-09-17T09:03:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/?p=247915"},"modified":"2026-09-17T10:42:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:42:45","slug":"phone-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/17\/phone-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Phone words"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently bought a copy of Los Alamos Rolodex, a book displaying business cards from Los Alamos Nation Labs from 1967 to 1978. You can find some examples of the cards here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One of the cards in the book is for Eugene Frank, President of B & F Instruments. His card lists his phone number as<\/p>\n

(215) MErcury 9-7100<\/p>\n

At first glance I thought the “E” in “MErcury” had been accidentally capitalized. Then I realized the intention was that someone would dial ME (i.e. 63) and ingore “rcury”. So the phone number would be (215) 639-7100.<\/p>\n

This card was from 1968, the height of the space race. Presumably the card was alluding to the Project Mercury or the planet Mercury, or both.<\/p>\n

The telephone keypad mapping (ITU E.161 standard) is a poor attempt at making phone numbers more memorable. For starters, there’s no way to encode 0 or 1 [1]. It’s unlikely a phone number will correspond to anything memorable unless you come up with the word first and then try to obtain the phone number, such as 800 FLOWERS.<\/p>\n

Inserting extra letters, as Mr. Frank did, greatly increases the chances of encoding a phone number as a word. But then you need to denote which letters count and which ones are filler, so there’s not much advantage. Still, I wanted to play around with it for fun. I found 109 words [1] containing the letters from a telephone encoding of 4228646. (I’m using the file \/usr\/share\/dict\/words<\/code> on my laptop as my list of words.)<\/p>\n

Here are some of the more interesting hits.<\/p>\n