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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.
Originally, where a place's name began with the letter "O" the code would begin with two zeros, such as Oxford: 0OX2 where OX = 09. These codes starting with "00" were later reallocated, freeing the prefix 00 for use by calls to the Republic of Ireland, to radiophones and to premium rate numbers.
Telephone dial number card of c.1948 with the local telephone number 4-5876 in Atlantic City, NJ, using the central office prefix 4, later converted to AT4 Face of a 1939 rotary telephone dial with the telephone number LA-2697, which includes the first two letters of Lakewood, New Jersey, as the central office prefix, later converted to LA6.
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.
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.