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Why didn't Phonewords take off in the UK?

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The first thing I did when getting to the USA as a kid, was to find a payphone where I dutifully called 1-800-STARWARS.

I'd grown up with American media. Phonewords - where your phone's dialpad spells out words - were ingrained in my psyche.

But the UK never had anything like that. In 2003, a reverse-charges company tried to make it a thing. Here's how they tried to teach UK users how to spell out words on their keypad:

Not even Holly Valance could convince the British public to adopt Phonewords!

The UK mobile operators adopted 7726 (SPAM) as the number for reporting spam SMS.

But, other than that, I've never seen a UK company use them.

Why is that?

(This is mostly a rhetorical question - with some historical suggestions.)

The UK did use phone letters!

In the 1933 film "The Coming of the Dial" - the British public were introduced to a telephone system which did not require an operator to place the call.

I thoroughly recommend watching this beautiful movie:

At one point, you'll see this dial - complete with letters!

A black and white photo of an old rotary dial phone.

There are three interesting things to note:

  1. The lettering sequence is subtly different from the modern style. The letter O is on the Zero - presumably to reduce homographic confusion. I assume Q isn't there for the same reason. Z is easily confused with 2, so is dumped. But I is there, even though it can be confused with the number 1.
  2. There are Phonewords! Dial TRU for Trunk Calls, and TEL for Telegrams.
  3. The telephone number is listed as "GERRARD 2666-7". Dialling codes were often alphanumeric!

Old Dialling Codes

Here's the Illustrated London News, from Saturday 19 November 1927. It's a gorgeous description of a Strowger automatic telephone system. A highly detailed set of drawings showing how an exchange works.

Nestled at the bottom is this:

Text describing how to dial a phone number.

A subscriber wishing to call a friend whose number is "HOLborn 4932" [...] inserts a finger-tip in a hole in the revolvable disc above "H" [..] The letters "O," "L," followed by the figures "4, 9, 3, 2"

The UK's old dialling codes were based on the name of the exchange!

So what happened?

At some point, letters slowly vanished from phones. I suspect because it was no more convenient to remember "HOL" than "405".

https://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/2059150331

When touch-tone dialling came out, BT was still a monopoly. As my friend Sam Machin points out, their standard phone didn't have letters on it.

When I was growing up, the payphones didn't always have letters on them:

Photo of a BT Payphone dialling pad. There are only numbers visible, no letters. Originally from https://www.flickr.com/photos/joybot/6207493770/

But was this cause, or effect?

What made Americans embrace 1-800-FLOWERS, while the UK didn't? Was it because of our love of "catchy" jingles?

Possibly not...

Nowadays, of course, every phone pad has letters on it.

A modern Android dial pad.

But, let's be honest, who even makes phone calls any more? As we move to a world of social media addresses and VoIP services, the phone number - and by extension Phonewords - have reached the end of the line.

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12 thoughts on “Why didn't Phonewords take off in the UK?”

    1. Pete Singleton says:

      I have seen (but not recently) Dyno Rod sporting phone words on their vans... something like 0800-DYNO-ROD, (don't quote me) with the number equivalent underneath.

      Reply

  8. says:

    25 or so years ago when I asked on Cix if anyone knew why there were several seemingly unrelated businesses in Mile End called 'Advance'. Someone gave me a copy of the names from a phone book, and ADV (238) was indeed the original code for Bow and Mile End exchange from Director exchange days. While some names had a justification, others were arbitrary, such as that one. A wrinkle was that these numbers were changed in the 60s and the ADV exchange became 980, so 30 or so years later, there were still businesses (and quite possibly still are), whose names were inspired by an random choice of name in the 1950s. It was relatively common in London and I believe it happened in Liverpool and Birmingham as well, so quite possibly all areas that had satellite Director exchanges.

    A list of the names is here: https://rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php and there are links to the same lists from 60s phone books.

    Reply

  9. JeremyGH says:

    'Named' exchanges (like my old one, WORdsworth) went with the introduction of all figure dialling in the late 1960s - the other change at that time was the introduction of the 01 for London prefix. All as I understand was to add more numbering capacity - both locally (limit to the number of names they could devise to match the possible numbers, especially if some degree of meaningfulness was desired) and nationally, as STD (subscriber trunk dialing: something we now take for granted, but then a novelty) came in. (As an aside, would you dial WORdsworth correctly?)

    The first of a series of changes to make more numbers available... whether there are enough to get through the century, we shall see

    And also, as international telephoning (and dialing) came in, the British number-letter correspondence, on our dials, came up against other countries' correspondences, in their numbers (and vice versa) causing confusion and wrong numbers...

    So once all figure dialing was established, by the 1970s, letters were dropped from dials.
    Only to reappear when we started to get imported phones, with all sorts of letter/number matching...

    But one of those questions - did we Brits get the habit of saying 'O' for '0' from the phone - or was it the other way round, that the GPO took it from what we already did?

    Reply

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