Phone numbers that do correspond to memorable words are highly valued. The sounds associated with the letters for a given digit have nothing in common, so a number can be represented by dissimilar sounds, and similar sounds do not represent the same number.Įncoding telephone numbers as words is rarely possible using the conventional keypad letters. It’s the kind of thing James Scott would call “legible,” something that looks simple on paper and warms a bureaucrat’s heart, but doesn’t necessarily work well in practice. The conventional phone keypad looks simpler: 2 = A, B, or C, 3 = D, E, or F, etc. And the number 6 can be encoded as one of several similar sounds: ch, sh, soft g, or soft z. The symbol ŋ as a possible encoding for 2 represents the ng sound in sing. The number 1 is encoded by any of the sounds “t”, “d”, or “th.” The IPA symbol θ represents the th sound in think and the ð represents the th sound in this. Some of the sounds associated with digits are not represented by a single letter in English and so the keypad above contains a few IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols. If you have a photographic memory for symbols, just memorize the digits and don’t bother with any mnemonic system. The Major system emphasizes sounds because humans remember sounds more easily than symbols. For example, a possible mnemonic for 7450 is gorillas. One nice feature of the Major system is that if you multiply a number by 10, you can pluralize its mnemonic. Note that gorilla decodes to 745 and not 7455 because the word has only one L sound, even though it is spelled with two Ls. For example, if you wanted to memorize 745, you might encode it as gorilla. The system associates a consonant sound with each digit you’re free to insert any vowels you like. The Major memory system is a way of encoding numbers as words to make them easier to memorize. I wondered what phone keypads would look like if they used the Major memory system, and so I made the image below. That made me think about how much better the Major system is. The keypad used the same letter-to-digit convention as a phone, but the letters were not printed on the keypad. This weekend I had to enter an alphabetic passcode on a numeric keypad.
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