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   letters on some telephones

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Topic: letters on some telephones (Read 4232 times)

Benny
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letters on some telephones
« on: Jun 2^nd, 2008, 2:47pm »

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Why are the "Q" and "Z" missing from some telephones, while the "1" has no letters with it?

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Frumious Bandersnatch
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Re: letters on some telephones
« Reply #1 on: Jun 5^th, 2008, 9:23am »

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This is more of a history/trivia question than a riddle, isn't it?

Still, this being my first day, I'll err on the side of caution and spoiler-proof this.

The short answer is: There aren't letters on 1 or 0 because those numbers have special functions, and there's no Q or Z because that way each number from 2-9 gets three letters and Q and Z were deemed the least essential.

The long answer goes back to the days when cities were broken up into smaller calling areas called "exchanges." (Technically, I think there still are exchanges, but they're no longer tied to your actual phone number.) You could call anybody in the same exchange by just dialing the number. Outside of your exchange, you had to ring the operator and ask for the exchange and number you wanted, and they'd connect you. You'll see this in old movies. The example that springs to mind is the Jimmy Stewart movie Ring Northside 777 -- "Northside" was the exchange, and 777 was the number. If you were calling somebody in another city, you'd have to get the long distance operator, and ask for the city, exchange, and number you wanted.

As the population expanded and technology improved, this largely manual system became outdated and was replaced by the 3-digit area code, 7-digit phone number system we still have today. When the phone company (back in those days, there was just THE phone company -- AT&T) came up with this system they wanted to retain the exchange names that people were accustomed to, and so they hit on the idea of mapping the letters of the alphabet to the numbers on the phone. The first two digits of your 7-digit phone number would correspond to the first two letters of your exchange. This is why you sometimes see old ads with phone numbers written like "NOrthside 5-5555."

1 and 0 didn't get letters because they couldn't be part of an exchange. Instead, they were used to differentiate between area codes and exchanges:

(X = any digit other than 1 or 0; Y = any digit including 1 or 0; Z= either a 1 or a 0)

XXX-YYYY: A local call within my area code
1-XXX-YYYY: A toll (long distance) call within my area code
1-XZY-XXX-YYYY: A call to another area code
0: A call to the operator

Anyway, now we've got 26 letters of the alphabet to assign to the numbers 2-9. If we put three letters on each number, that's 24, so we need to discard two letters. "Q" is a no-brainer, since in common English words it can only be followed by a "U", which would restrict the number of viable exchanges. Then it's a toss-up between X and Z, neither of which appear at the beginning of very many words. They semi-arbitrarily decided that exchanges like EXeter or OXford were more likely than ZEbra or AZathoth, and so X got to stay and Z got the heave-ho.

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