A
telephone number or
phone number is a sequence of numbers used to call from one
telephone lineA telephone line or telephone circuit is a single-user circuit on a telephone communications system...
to another in a
public switched telephone networkThe public switched telephone network is the network of the world's public circuit-switched telephone networks, in much the same way that the Internet is the network of the world's public IP-based packet-switched networks...
. When telephone numbers were invented, they were short — as few as one, two or three digits — and were used by people to call a few neighbors. As phone systems have grown and interconnected to encompass the world, telephone numbers have become longer. In addition to
telephoneThe telephone is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sound, most commonly the human voice. It is one of the most common household appliances in the developed world, and has long been considered indispensable to business, industry and government...
s, they now access other devices, such as computers and fax machines.
The number contains the information necessary to identify uniquely the intended endpoint for the
telephone callA telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the calling party and the called party.-Information transmission:A telephone call may carry ordinary voice transmission using a telephone, data transmission when the calling party and called party are using modems, or facsimile...
. Each such endpoint must have a unique number within the
public switched telephone networkThe public switched telephone network is the network of the world's public circuit-switched telephone networks, in much the same way that the Internet is the network of the world's public IP-based packet-switched networks...
. Most countries use fixed length numbers (for normal lines at least) and therefore the number of endpoints determines the necessary length of the telephone number. It is also possible for each subscriber to have a set of shorter numbers for the endpoints most often used. These "shorthand" or "speed calling" numbers are automatically translated to unique telephone numbers before the call can be connected. Some special services have their own short numbers (e.g.
9-1-19-1-1 is the emergency telephone number for the North American Numbering Plan . It is one of eight N11 codes...
,
0-0-0, 9-9-9 and
1-1-1111 is the emergency telephone number in New Zealand.111 was first implemented in Masterton and Carterton on 29 September 1958, and was progressively rolled out nationwide with the last exchanges converting in 1988...
, being the Emergency Services numbers for Canada and the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, respectively.)
Many systems also allow calls within a local area to be made without dialing the local area code. For example, a phone number in North America will start with three numbers (such as 918), which is the area code, followed by seven digits split into sections of three and four (such as 555-1212), which is the local number.
Most telephone networks today are interconnected in the international telephone network, where the format of telephone numbers is standardized by
ITU-TThe Telecommunication Standardization Sector coordinates standards for telecommunications on behalf of the International Telecommunication Union and is based in Geneva, Switzerland....
in the recommendation
E.164E.164 is an ITU-T recommendation which defines the international public telecommunication numbering plan used in the PSTN and some other data networks. It also defines the format of telephone numbers. E.164 numbers can have a maximum of fifteen digits and are usually written with a + prefix...
, which specifies that the entire number should be 15 digits or shorter, and begin with a country prefix. For most countries, this is followed by an area code or city code and the subscriber number, which might consist of the code for a particular
telephone exchangeIn the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls...
.
ITU-TThe Telecommunication Standardization Sector coordinates standards for telecommunications on behalf of the International Telecommunication Union and is based in Geneva, Switzerland....
recommendation
E.123ITU-T Recommendation E.123, or the Notation for national and international telephone numbers Recommendation E.123 defines a standard way to write telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and web addresses...
describes how to represent an international telephone number in writing or print, starting with a plus sign ("+") and the country code. When calling an international number from a fixed line phone, the + must be replaced with the
international call prefix chosen by the country the call is being made from. Some mobile phones allow the + to be entered directly.
The
formatA telephone numbering plan is a system of allocating and routing telephone numbers in a telephone network. A closed numbering plan, such as found in North America, features fixed length area codes and local numbers. An open numbering plan features variance in length of area code or local number, or...
and allocation of local phone numbers are controlled by each nation's respective government, either directly or by sponsored organizations (such as
NANPANanpa or nampa , in Japanese culture, is a type of flirting and seduction, popular among teenagers and people in their twenties and thirties.-Word:...
overseen by NeuStar Inc.). See
Telephone numbering planA telephone numbering plan is a system of allocating and routing telephone numbers in a telephone network. A closed numbering plan, such as found in North America, features fixed length area codes and local numbers. An open numbering plan features variance in length of area code or local number, or...
.
Before a
telephone callA telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the calling party and the called party.-Information transmission:A telephone call may carry ordinary voice transmission using a telephone, data transmission when the calling party and called party are using modems, or facsimile...
is connected, the telephone number must be dialed by the
calling partyThe calling party is a person who initiates a telephone call over the public switched telephone network, usually by dialing a telephone number....
or Caller. The
called partyThe called party is a person who answers a telephone call. The person who initiates a telephone call is the calling party....
might have equipment that presents
caller IDCaller ID, known also as caller identification , or more properly calling number identification , is a telephone service, available on POTS lines, that transmits a caller's number to the called party's telephone equipment during the ringing signal, or when the call is being set up but before the...
before the call is answered.
Business phones
Businesses in the middle 20th century and earlier had a single telephone number for the main
telephone switchboardA switchboard was a device used to connect a group of telephones manually to one another or to an outside connection, within and between telephone exchanges or private branch exchanges . The user was typically known as an operator...
of that business. A
switchboard operatorMedium-to-large organizations often employ switchboard operators—specialized staff who answer general telephone calls to the organization and usually maintain internal communication through telephones, and pagers....
would connect the call within the business. If the called party didn't answer, the caller was typically transferred back to the switchboard. With voicemail and more technology, businesses now use
Direct Inward DialingDirect inward dialing , also called direct dial-in in Europe and Australasia, is a feature offered by telephone companies for use with their customers' private branch exchange systems...
(DID) (Direct Dialing Inwards (DDI) in the UK) lines so that outside callers can call to a specific person in a business. Often, the DID number uses a pattern from the called party's telephone internal extension. For example, within the
Acme CorporationThe Acme Corporation or A Company that Makes Everything is a fictional corporation that exists in several cartoons, films and TV series, most significantly in the Looney Tunes universe, where it appeared most prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E...
, a caller may dial 225 to reach Mr. Smith, but an outside caller may dial 555-9225 to reach Mr. Smith (with the last three digits representing Mr. Smith's extension). Some companies arrange their
dial planA dial plan establishes the expected number and pattern of digits for a telephone number. This includes country codes, access codes, area codes and all combinations of digits dialed. For instance, the North American public switched telephone network uses a 10-digit dial plan that includes a...
to restrict the DDI capability to certain parts of the PABX or
CentrexCentrex is a contraction of central exchange, a kind of telephone exchange.-Use of Centrex:Centrex is a PBX-like service providing switching at the central office instead of at the customer's premises...
numbering range: Mr Smith on 225 might have it, but Mr Jones on 374 or Mr Brown on 427 would not. If a merger has happened in the past there may even be different exchange codes mapping to different parts of the internal numbering range. DID became an important feature of
CentrexCentrex is a contraction of central exchange, a kind of telephone exchange.-Use of Centrex:Centrex is a PBX-like service providing switching at the central office instead of at the customer's premises...
.
Some companies have a sufficient need for internal extensions that the whole numbering range following the exchange code represents company extensions. A real example of this in the UK is the former Post Office's headquarters in Central London: the PABX was made an end node exchange in the London
Director areaThe Director System was a system which made it possible to call subscribers at other telephone exchanges without operator intervention in large multi-exchange cities...
, with the code 432. The automanual board was given the extension number 1234, so in the days before all-figure numbering outside callers reached the switchboard by dialing
HEAdquarters 1234. The
White HouseThe White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the President of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., it was built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the late Georgian style and has been the residence of every...
in Washington, DC is another example, having the 202-456 exchange.
US phone number history
In the late 1870s the Bell interests started utilizing their patent with a rental scheme, in which they would rent their instruments to individual users who would contract with other suppliers to connect them, for example from home to office to factory.
Western UnionThe Western Union Company is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is in Greenwood Village, Colorado, and its international marketing and commercial services headquarters are in Montvale, New Jersey...
and the Bell company both soon realized that a subscription service would be more profitable, with the invention of the
telephone switchboardA switchboard was a device used to connect a group of telephones manually to one another or to an outside connection, within and between telephone exchanges or private branch exchanges . The user was typically known as an operator...
or central office. Such an office was staffed by an
operatorA telephone operator is either* a person who provides assistance to a telephone caller, usually in the placing of operator assisted telephone calls such as calls from a pay phone, collect calls , calls which are billed to a credit card, station-to-station and person-to-person calls, and certain...
who connected the calls by personal names.
The latter part of 1879 and the early part of 1880 saw the first use of telephone numbers at
Lowell, MassachusettsLowell is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 105,167. It is the fifth largest city in the state...
. During an epidemic of measles, the physician, Dr. Moses Greeley Parker, feared that Lowell's four telephone operators might all succumb to sickness and bring about a paralysis of telephone service. He recommended the use of numbers for calling Lowell's more than 200 subscribers so that substitute operators might be more easily trained in the event of such an emergency. Parker was convinced of the telephone's potential, began buying stock, and by 1883 he was one of the largest individual stockholders in both the American Telephone Company and the
New England Telephone and Telegraph CompanyThe New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was the first company set up to develop the then-new telephone. It lasted just a year, from 1878 to 1879, and had no direct relationship to the later company of the same name, which after the breakup of the Bell System in 1984 became part of the NYNEX...
.
Even after the assignment of numbers, operators still connected most calls into the early 20th century; "Hello Central, get me Underwood-342." Connecting through operators or "Central" was the norm until mechanical direct-dialing of numbers became more common in the 1920s.
In rural areas with
magneto crank telephonesIn telephony, ringdown is a method of signaling an operator in which telephone ringing current is sent over the line to operate a lamp or cause the operation of a self-locking relay known as a drop...
connected to
party linesIn twentieth century telephone systems, a party line is an arrangement in which two or more customers are connected directly to the same local loop. Prior to World War II in the United States, party lines were the primary way residential subscribers acquired local phone service...
, the local phone number consisted of the line number plus the ringing pattern of the subscriber. To dial a number such as "3R122" meant making a request to the operator the third party line (if making a call off your own local one), followed by turning the telephone's crank once, a short pause, then twice and twice again. Also common was a code of long and short rings, so one party's call might be signaled by two longs and another's by two longs followed by a short. It was not uncommon to have over a dozen ring cadences (and subscribers) on one line.
In
North AmericaNorth America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and in the western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific...
, the digits 2–9 of phone numbers were allotted 3 letters of the alphabet apiece. This left room for only 24 letters, so the uncommon letters Q and Z were omitted. In the
UKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
, the letters O and Q were allocated to the digit 0, to reduce caller confusion among similar characters; digit 6 had only M and N, and digit 7 had P, R and S.
Phone numbers were usually not strictly numeric until the mid-1960s. From the 1920s until then, most urban areas had "
exchangesDuring the early years of telephone service, communities that required more than 10,000 telephone numbers, whether dial service was available or not, utilized exchange names to distinguish identical numerics for different customers....
" of two letters, followed by numbers. In the UK, however, exchanges in the major cities with
DirectorThe Director System was a system which made it possible to call subscribers at other telephone exchanges without operator intervention in large multi-exchange cities...
installations were represented by three letters followed by four numbers; the letters usually represented the name of the exchange area (e.g.
MAYfair,
WATerloo), or something memorable about the locality (e.g.
POPesgrove — an area where Alexander Pope once lived). This was considered easier to remember, although in London in the later part of this period it required the memorization of 7 characters (roughly the same number of characters as is usual for local calling in 2008). A word would represent the first two digits to be dialed, for example "TWinbrook" for "89" ; "BYwater" for "29". UK numbers had no letters at all except for those in the Director areas, where the first three of the seven digits were assigned letters, and written "
ABBey 1234" or "
WHItehall 1212", for example. A lack of pronounceable words, and the fact that most telephones world-wide have no letters on anyway, have led to the abandonment of letter usage in directory numbers except for publicity purposes.
The use of
numbers starting in 555-In North America, telephone numbers with the prefix 555 are widely used for fictitious telephone numbers in television shows, films, computer games, and other media....
(
KLondike-5) to represent fictional numbers in U.S. movies, television, and literature originated in this period. The "555" prefix was reserved for telephone company use and was only consistently used for Directory Assistance (Information), being "555-1212" for the local area. An attempt to dial a 555 number from a movie in the real world will always result in an error message when dialed from a phone in the United States. This reduces the likelihood of nuisance calls. Also,
QUincy(5-5555) was used, because there was no Q available.
Phone numbers were traditionally tied down to a single location; because exchanges were "hard-wired", the first 3 digits of any number were tied to the geographic location of the exchange.
Alphanumeric telephone numbers in popular culture
Because the switches were hard-wired together and fairly hard to re-wire (or
re-grade), telephone exchange buildings in many larger cities in North America were dedicated to circuits that began with the first two or three digits of the standard 7 digit phone numbers. In a holdover from the days of plug-board exchanges, the exchanges were typically named with a name whose first two letters translated to the digits of the exchange's prefix on a common telephone dial. Examples: CAstle (22), TRinity (87), MUtual (68), and KLondike (55). Certain number combinations were not amenable to this naming process, such as "57," "95" and "97". It was in part due to this factor that
telephone exchange namesDuring the early years of telephone service, communities that required more than 10,000 telephone numbers, whether dial service was available or not, utilized exchange names to distinguish identical numerics for different customers....
were finally abandoned, since more numbers were needed to prevent a given Area Code from running out of available numbers.
In the past, the first two or three digits could be represented by a mnemonic exchange name, e.g. 869-1234 was formerly TOwnsend 9-1234, and before that (in some localities) might have been TOWnsend 1234 (only the capital letters and numbers being dialed) or it could have been TOwnsend 1234 (86-1234)
In December 1930,
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
became the first city in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to adopt the two-letter, five-number format. It remained alone in this respect until well after
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, when other municipalities across the country began to follow suit. From the 1920s through the 1950s, most larger American cities used the Bell System standard format of two letters which began the exchange name followed by four numbers, as in DUnkirk 0799. Prior to the mid-1950s, the number immediately following the name could never be a "0" or "1" - indeed, "0" was never pressed into service at all, except in the immediate
Los AngelesLos Angeles is the largest city in the state of California and the second largest in the United States. Often abbreviated as L.A. and nicknamed The City of Angels, Los Angeles has an estimated population of 3.8 million and spans over in Southern California...
area. (The "BEnsonhurst 0" exchange mentioned in an episode of the former TV sitcom
The HoneymoonersThe Honeymooners is a situation comedy television show that was created by Marvin Marx, and shot before a live audience which debuted as a half-hour series on October 1, 1955...
was a fictitious one.)
In 1955, the
Bell SystemThe Bell System was the AT&T monopoly that provided telephone service in the United States from 1877 to 1984 when it was broken up into separate companies by a Federal mandate....
attempted to standardize the process of naming exchanges by issuing a "recommended list" of names to be used for the various number combinations. In 1961, the New York Telephone Company introduced "selected-letter" exchanges, in which the two letters did not mark the start of any particular name (example: FL 6-9970), and by 1965 all newly-connected phone numbers nationwide consisted of numerals only. (
Wichita Falls, TexasWichita Falls is a city in the state of Texas and the county seat of Wichita County, Texas, United States. Wichita Falls is the principal city of the Wichita Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Archer, Clay and Wichita counties. According to the U.S...
, had been the first locality in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to implement the latter, having done so in 1958.) Pre-existing numbers continued to be displayed the old way in many places well into the 1970s. An example would be Boushelle, a company outside Chicago, still uses HUdson3-2700 in their commercials.
Most of the
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
had no lettered telephone dials until the introduction of
Subscriber Trunk Dialing (STD) in 1958. Prior to that time, only the
"director"The Director System was a system which made it possible to call subscribers at other telephone exchanges without operator intervention in large multi-exchange cities...
areas (Birmingham, Manchester Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London) and the "non-director" areas adjacent to them had the lettered dials, and the director exchanges used the three-letter, four-number format. With the introduction of trunk dialing, the need for all callers to be able to dial numbers with letters in them led to the much more widespread use of lettered dials. The need for dials with letters was finally abandoned with the conversion to all-digit numbering in 1968.
Because the pulses from a
rotary dialThe rotary dial is a device mounted on or in a telephone or switchboard that is designed to send interrupted electrical pulses, known as pulse dialing, corresponding to the number dialed. The early form of the rotary dial used lugs on a finger plate instead of holes. A patent was filed on August...
(as used to operate switches in a
StrowgerThe Strowger switch, also known as Step-by-Step or SXS, is an early electromechanical telephone switching system invented by Almon Brown Strowger. It is a specialized version of a stepping switch.-History:...
exchange) took time, having a phone number with lots of 8s, 9s, or 0s meant it took longer to dial the number. The phone companies typically assigned such "high" numbers to pay phones because they were rarely dialed to.
To test the basic functioning of all of the switches in a chain, a special "test" number was reserved that consisted of all 5s (555-5555) — half-way up and in on each bank. The "
555In North America, telephone numbers with the prefix 555 are widely used for fictitious telephone numbers in television shows, films, computer games, and other media....
" (or KLondike-5) exchange was never assigned any real numbers (with limited exceptions such as 555-1212 for
directory assistanceIn telecommunications, directory assistance or directory enquiries is a phone service used to find out a specific telephone number and/or address of a residence or business.-Technology:...
), which is why today's TV and movie shows use 555-xxxx numbers for their phone numbers (previously, such productions often used numbers that ended in certain four-number combinations that were typically set aside for similar uses — "0079" on the West Coast and "9970" in many other places; examples include the TV series
Perry MasonPerry Mason is an American TV series produced by Paisano Productions that ran from 1957 to 1966. Perry Mason was played by actor Raymond Burr. The title character is a fictional Los Angeles, California, defense attorney who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner...
and the 1948 film
Sorry, Wrong NumberSorry, Wrong Number is a classic 1948 suspense film noir which tells the story of a woman who overhears a plot for murder. It stars Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards, Wendell Corey, Ed Begley, Leif Erickson and William Conrad....
). "KLondike-5" was also heard in the
Perry Mason show. That way there was no possibility that a fake number from a show would actually reach someone, thus avoiding the scenario which arose in 1982 with
Tommy TutoneTommy Tutone is a power pop-rock band, best known for its 1982 hit "867-5309/Jenny", which peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Although it is usually referred to as a San Francisco band, it was actually based in Willits, California, at the time that "Jenny" was released...
's hit song "
867-5309/Jenny"867‒5309/Jenny" is a song written by Alex Call and Jim Keller and performed by Tommy Tutone that was released on the album Tommy Tutone 2, on the Columbia Records label. It peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number one on the Billboard Top Tracks chart in 1982...
". This song led to many customers who actually had that number receiving a plethora of unwanted calls. In fact, many American phone companies either no longer assign this number, or they have relegated it to internal testing purposes.
As of early August 2009, (267) 867-5309, which is assigned to the suburban Philadelphia area, is being auctioned on
eBayeBay Inc. is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. A majority of the sales take place through a set-time auction format, but subsequent methods include...
. Bidding is in excess of $5,000 USD.
However, today only numbers beginning with 555-01xx are reserved for fiction and other 555-numbers can be allocated to "information providers". A side effect of the fictional-number pool being reduced to 100 numbers is that the same ones now often recur in different movies or TV shows. The "958" and "959" exchanges have also been reserved for similar purposes in most localities, and as a result very few individuals or businesses have telephone numbers beginning with those sets of digits either (although this fact is not as well known, so such numbers have not been used in a fictional context).
The number in the
Glenn Miller OrchestraThe Glenn Miller Orchestra was originally formed in 1937 by Glenn Miller. It was arranged around a clarinet and tenor saxophone playing melody, while three other saxophones played the harmony...
's hit song "
PEnnsylvania 6-5000PEnnsylvania 6-5000 is said to be the oldest continuing phone number in New York City. It belongs to the Hotel Pennsylvania and has been in continuous use since 1919. The telephone number is based on the old telephone exchange name system...
" is the number of the
Hotel PennsylvaniaThe Hotel Pennsylvania is a hotel located at 401 7th Avenue in Manhattan, across the street from Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden in New York City.- History :...
in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
, and was issued in 1919. The number is now written as +1-212-736-5000. According to the hotel's website, PEnnsylvania 6-5000 is New York's oldest continually assigned telephone number, and possibly the oldest continuously-assigned number in the world.
In 2003, the movie
Bruce AlmightyBruce Almighty is a American comedy film, directed by Tom Shadyac and written by Steve Koren, Mark O'Keefe and Steve Oedekerk. It stars Jim Carrey as Bruce Nolan, a down on his luck TV reporter who seeks a promotion and a better life overall. After a series of bad incidents, such as being beaten...
originally featured a number that did not have the 555 prefix. In the movie, God (
Morgan FreemanMorgan Porterfield Freeman, Jr. is an American actor, film director, and narrator. He is noted for his reserved demeanor and authoritative speaking voice....
) left the number for Bruce Nolan (
Jim CarreyJames Eugene "Jim" Carrey is a Canadian-American actor and stand-up comedian. Carrey is best known for his performances as multiple characters in the sketch comedy show In Living Color, as the title character in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, as the unlucky TV...
) to call if he needed God's help. According to
Universal StudiosUniversal Studios , a subsidiary of NBC Universal, is one of the six major American movie studios. Its main motion picture production/distribution arm is called Universal Pictures. Its production studios are located at 100 Universal City Plaza Drive in Universal City, California...
, which produced the movie, the number it used was picked because it did not exist in
Buffalo, New YorkBuffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, second only to New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River, Buffalo is the principal city of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area and the seat of Erie...
where the movie was set. However, the number
did exist in other cities, resulting in customers having that number receiving random calls from people asking for God. While some played along with the gag, others found the calls aggravating. One woman even considered a lawsuit against Universal. The number was reportedly changed when the movie was released on DVD.
Martin ScorseseMartin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. He is the founder of the World Cinema Foundation, a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema and has won awards from the Oscars, Golden Globe,...
's
After HoursAfter Hours is an American black comedy film released in 1985, directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Joseph Minion. It depicts Paul Hackett , a New Yorker who experiences a series of adventures and perils in trying to make his way home from SoHo.-Plot:Paul Hackett , a word processor, meets a...
contains a working phone number in it, 243-3460, but no area code is explicitly given.
Numeric trivia
One of the most expensive phone numbers in the world is 666-6666 which was sold for USD$2.75 million in
DohaDoha is the capital city of Qatar. Located on the Persian Gulf, it has a population of 400,051 according to the 2005 census,, and is also one of the municipalities of Qatar...
,
QatarQatar , also known as the State of Qatar or locally ', is an Arab emirate in the Middle East, occupying the small Qatar Peninsula on the northeasterly coast of the larger Arabian Peninsula...
, as part of a charity event in 2006.
Another is 888-8888, which was sold for USD$270,723 in
ChengduChengdu , located in southwest People's Republic of China, is the capital of Sichuan province and a sub-provincial city. Chengdu is also one of the most important economic centers, transportation and communication hubs in Southwestern China...
,
ChinaChina is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
.
8| class="infobox" style="width: 20em;"|-! colspan="2" align="center" style="font: 10em times; background:#ccc;" | 8|-| colspan="2" | |-| Cardinal| 8
eight|-| Ordinal| 8th
eighth|-| Numeral system| octal|-| Factorization| |-| Divisors...
is traditionally considered a lucky number in Chinese culture.
Computer industry pioneer
Steve WozniakStephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak is an American computer engineer who founded Apple Computer, Inc. with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing significantly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in...
, a collector of phone numbers, obtained the phone number 888-8888, but it proved unusable: Children playing with phones would dial it, resulting in more than a hundred wrong numbers a day.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz_pr.html
In
QuebecQuebec is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking identity and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
, the
Journal de Montréal newspaper has been using the 888-8888 phone number for a few years for its classifieds section. There is a word game in French between this number and "vite, vite, vite, vite, vite, vite, vite" for "fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast". ("Vite" (fast) and "Huit" (eight) sound similar.) It is now mandatory to dial the area code first, so the number is now (514) 888-8888...
Intercepted number
In the middle 20th century when a call could not be completed, for example because the phone number was not assigned, had been disconnected, or was in trouble, it went to an
intercept operator who informed the caller. In the 1970s this service was converted to
Automatic Intercept Systems which automatically chooses and presents an appropriate
intercept messageAn intercept message is a telephone recording informing the caller that the call cannot be completed, for any of a number of reasons ranging from local congestion, to disconnection of the dialled phone, or network trouble along the route....
. Disconnected numbers are definitely reassigned to new users after the rate of calls to them declines.
See also
- E.123
ITU-T Recommendation E.123, or the Notation for national and international telephone numbers Recommendation E.123 defines a standard way to write telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and web addresses...
ITU recommendation for storing emergency contact number in cellphone
- Geographic number
A geographic number is a telephone number, from a range of numbers in the United Kingdom National Telephone Numbering Plan, where part of its digit structure contains geographic significance used for routing calls to the physical location of the network termination point of the subscriber to whom...
- List of country calling codes
- Local conventions for writing telephone numbers
Every country has different local conventions for writing telephone numbers. Writing a telephone number in a different format will look strange to a resident, and may lead to incorrect dialing when area codes are omitted for local calls....
- Long distance
In telecommunications, a long distance call is a telephone call made outside a certain area, usually characterized by an area code outside of a local call area...
- MSISDN
- Phonewords
- Telephone numbering plan
A telephone numbering plan is a system of allocating and routing telephone numbers in a telephone network. A closed numbering plan, such as found in North America, features fixed length area codes and local numbers. An open numbering plan features variance in length of area code or local number, or...
- Zenith number
A Zenith number is a special type of toll-free telephone number in the United States and Canada that was introduced prior to the development of WATS toll-free service. It allows a calling party to call the number's owner at no charge by dialing the operator and requesting the specified Zenith...
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