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Telephone numbers listed in 1920 in New York City having three-letter exchange prefixes. In the United States, the most-populous cities, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, initially implemented dial service with telephone numbers consisting of three letters and four digits (3L-4N) according to a system developed by W. G. Blauvelt of AT&T in 1917. [1]
In the UK, letters were assigned to numbers in a similar fashion to North America, except that the letter O was allocated to the digit 0 (zero); digit 6 had only M and N. The letter Q was later added to the zero position on British dials, in anticipation of direct international dialing to Paris, which commenced in 1963.
This was accomplished by adding the digit "9" to the beginning of any phone number that started with a "9" (government and semi-government connections), and adding the digit "3" to any phone numbers that did not start with the number "9". [1] It is common to write phone numbers as (0xx) yyyyyyy, where xx is the area code.
The Australian letter-to-number mapping was A=1, B=2, F=3, J=4, L=5, M=6, U=7, W=8, X=9, Y=0, so the phone number BX 3701 was in fact 29 3701. When Australia around 1960 changed to all-numeric telephone dials, a mnemonic to help people associate letters with numbers was the sentence, "All Big Fish Jump Like Mad Under Water eXcept Yabbies ."
Subscriber names are generally listed in alphabetical order, together with their postal or street address and telephone number.In principle every subscriber in the geographical coverage area is listed, but subscribers may request the exclusion of their number from the directory, often for a fee; their number is then said to be "unlisted" (US and Canada), "ex-directory" (British English), or ...
As phone lines became more popular—between 1942 and 1962, the number of phones in the U.S. grew 230% to 76 million—telephone companies realized they would run out of phone numbers.
A rural telephone number, often party line, had often up to four digits and a letter or letter and digits to indicate which of the multiple parties on the line was desired. Various methods were used to convert these to dialable numbers as dial systems replaced manual switchboards; many moderately-large cities used a 2L-4N format where "ADelaide ...
The main advantages of phonewords over standard phone numbers include increased memorability and increased response rates to advertising. They are easier to remember than numeric phone numbers; thus, when businesses use them as a direct response tool in their advertising (radio, television, print, outdoor, etc.), their memorability tends to have a favorable effect on response rates.